what are the best studying techniques in this video I'm going to do a tier list on some of the most common techniques that people use for studying if you're new to this Channel and wondering who I am I'm Dr Justin Sun I'm a learning coach and the head of learning at I can study I'm also a former medical doctor for the last decade I've trained thousands of people to learn more efficiently unlike a normal tier list I'm actually going to do this in two parts and the first one I'm going to just rank them as how people normally tend to use the technique and then I'm going to then rerank them based on how good they could be if they were either used the right way or with a few modifications that would make them a lot more effective but first the tier list based on the way I normally see people using these methods and so the first item on this list is to give this video a like because it really helps with the algorithm which motivates me to make more free content but anyway starting with the real first one on the list is pre-study so pre-study is a uh a pretty common kind of method that people will use it's basically just talking about studying something before learning it in what I call a main learning event which is basically like a lecture or maybe an intensive study session it's the time where you're thinking this is the first time I'm seriously going to sit down to properly study it that would be the main learning event and a pre-study is just any type of study that you do before that and uh I would say that the way that most most people do it can be of mixed Effectiveness uh and I'm going to give that a b pretty decent uh but this is definitely one that can really get better with a few modifications which we'll talk about in the second part next one is practice papers practice papers can be kind of a hidden miss a lot of people love practice papers for good reason and they can't be really effective um I would say that it's harder to do this wrong and so the common way that people use practice papers is not too bad and it's genuinely a pretty good way of practicing your retrieval and finding knowledge gaps as well as being able to test your knowledge at different levels of learning so I'm going to give this an a next on the list is brain dumps now if you watched my video on reacting to Tik Tok advice you know that blurting which is essentially a brain dump equivalent is a very commonly recommended uh method of studying which I think has kind of limited benefits especially in the way that people say to do it brain dumps can be again an effective way of full uncued or otherwise called free recall uh which is basically whenever you take anything from your memory and you just well I guess yeah like dump it out and that can be really helpful I've definitely used this a lot in the past and I recommend a lot of my students to use brain dumps um but but the thing with brain dumps is that they are very timec consuming inherently and there's not really any way to get past that and it's not a problem if that time returns for you a really high level of learning but the way that a lot of people do brain dumps it doesn't tend to hit that level of quality so I'm going to probably give this a I'm probably going to give this a c I think for the amount of time that you spend there are a lot of other things you can do that will probably be better okay another one Pomodoro Technique I've got a video on why the Pomodoro Technique is not that great and this is also the reason why a lot of people don't use the Pomodoro Technique long term having said that it is a really easy great starter technique there's no learning curve and if you use it it's it's pretty effective straight away there are things that you can do to make it even better but that doesn't stop it from being pretty good to begin with um and I think if this is something that you really struggle with which is like Focus focus and concentration I actually think that this is a very solid starting point I'm actually going to give it an a flash cards you know a lot of you will know about my channel because how I love to hate on flash cards but I don't hate flash cards flash cards can be an incredibly important and effective tool when you're learning when you're using it the right way it's just that if you don't use it the right way it can be very easy to get overwhelmed uh you can drown in your flash cards and again flash cards are not great at testing you in more complex types of learning and types of knowledge so there are certain situations where flash cards are very good but most people don't know what those situations are they don't know what conditions flash cards perform well in and which situations it would make you worse in I think based on just my experience with seeing how people tend to use it I'm going to give this a I'm actually going to give this a straightup d which I know like just chill out calm down let me finish but I don't hate flash cards let me explain flash cards can be really effective I'm going to go through how you can make it more effective later in the second part but 100% the way that most people use it it does make their whole experience of learning much harder than it needs to be and so because it's actually doing more harm than good and a lot of situations compared to what they could be doing right not compared to not studying at all like it's going to be good if you're not studying at all but compared to what you could be doing in the same amount of time with the same amount of effort yeah I got to give it a d all right the next one is space repetition which is uh really one of the driving principles behind flash cards the difference I think a lot of people will say space repetition flash cards are the same thing but they're not because space repetition can be in any form whereas flash cards are a very specific format of doing space repetition the idea of space retrieval and space retrieval practice is very advantageous and if you're doing some kind of space retrieval practice that's good now if that retrieval practice is not done very well it's not going to be as effective as it could be but as a fundamental principle you should be spacing retrieval sessions and therefore uh very very solid advice I think as as a general principle I'm going to give it an S I think the reason that most people won't get the full benefit from it it's not because they don't understand space repetition but it's because the rate that they're forgetting information is so fast that you have to basically be repeating things like every couple days otherwise you're forgetting so much so quickly that the next time you do it you're just like overwhelmed but that's not because the space repetition was a problem is because of the method we use during the session which is like a whole other you know topic next one is a findan technique or it's otherwise just called like self teing or like self-explanation refinment technique is a very very good method because it's easy to learn it's uh it's it's creating a lot of free recall opportunities it's also creating retrieval opportunities at multiple different levels of learning uh it requires you to synthesize and simplify and evaluate the quality of your learning so it's good for Gap finding and it's it's generally more time efficient and that you're going to find more gaps that are more high yield that are at different levels than you would with brain dumps or blurting so I'm going to give fan technique probably in the a category if people are using the findan technique generally speaking their Learning System tends to be reasonably decent next one is active recall again uh one of the things that I regret actually about you know one of the earlier videos that has now received over a million views by the way thank you uh is that I really um I hated on flash cards because of the you know space repetition active recall the problem with the pair um but really it's not the issue with active recall active recall in itself is not problematic active recall just is is anything that you do that causes you to recall information from your memory usually without queuing and that's good like you should really always try to do active recall if you can and there are lots of ways you can do this like you can do microactive recall like during a single study session you can be you know reading something covering it and then immediately just trying to synthesize and generate from memory without constantly referring to the resources that would be like active recall where the the spacing interval is only like seconds even and then of course there's like the more common ways of doing active recall which is like a day or a couple days or a week or a month later active recall as a principle in itself just like spaced repetition is incredibly effective and the way that most people use active recoil is mostly limited by by the fact that they don't know which techniques are the most effective to use for it but as long as you're recalling something from memory it tends to be pretty good I'm actually going to give this an A and it can really easily be bumped up to an S and I'll explain why later okay sleep looks straight away sleep's going to be S right sleep the the S stands for sleep it's sleep tier and the reason is because sleep is one of the most important things for learning sleep triggers something called Sleep dependent memory consolidation which is basically short-term memory that is in an inaccessible part of your brain being shunted over and then properly encoded into your long-term memory so if you do an all nighter the night before an exam you're not likely to be able to perform well in that exam number one because you're going to be sleep deprived uh which I think there are some studies and I'm not 100% sure about this but I think there are some studies that have shown that when you're sleep deprived your IQ points dropped by like 10 or 20 points or something like that uh if you know the actual statistic on this leave a comment let me know um but the effect that lack of sleep has on your cognitive performance is insane like you literally getting dumber and that's not what you want when you're setting an exam but apart from that also because you didn't consolidate your memory it means that the stuff that you studied over the last like few weeks of cramming they haven't been properly stored in a way that you can actually use that information and so like it it you just start crashing on all fronts I think once you start sacrificing sleep you are sacrificing like everything it's a last resort you should never really sacrifice sleep so definitely s tier super underrated as well summary Pages the idea behind summary pages is that you basically just take like a a longer set of notes and then you summarize them down into like really about as concise as you can can get it again summary pages is one of those techniques that is generally pretty effective um and you can't really do it that wrong there are many things that you can do that would be more effective and there are many ways that you can make summary Pages more effective the way that I normally see people using summary pages is like literally just condensing what they already have and like just like making it more concise but it's in the same format and and often in the same order which creates a lot of restrictions I will say that summary Pages I'm going to put this either B or C I'm going to put it at I'm going to put at C I'm going to put it at C uh I think it's about as effective as doing brain dumps and actually a lot of the time people are just creating summary Pages as part of like a blurting or brain dump activity so can be effective and again that's another one that could really shoot up if you were to do it better and some of you are probably doing them a little bit better anyway the next thing watching videos and lectures so again you know it's pretty broad but it's like not just watching something but like watching something and like re-watching it or like re-watching U like a lecture recording um just the idea of like consuming and taking in that information honestly even though obviously like you need to get the information to do anything with it so it's like a prerequisite of learning and as a technique it's really very low yield and the way that I see people use like lectures um and and videos and learning from any like auditory Source I just don't think a lot of people have good training around how to really make that work uh so I I actually think that that's probably a d like there are a lot of people that will be better off watching and re-watching lists and they would probably do better from it next up is pneumonics pneumonics really just mean any type of memory aid technically speaking but the way that most people use pneumonics is like an acronym or some kind of saying so for example like when I was studying medicine one of the pneumonics well there's lots of different pneumonics that we use but like one of the pneumonics would be like the surgical Civ which is like vitamin C D and and it's like a checklist of different things to ask a patient questions about like is the problem V man I haven't thought about this in like years so let's see if I can still remember it like is the problem vascular esic T traumatic maybe a for and this is why I'm not a doctor anymore look it's been four years since I've had to think about this um but I remember when I knew it it was kind of helpful and there are different pneumonics that can be helpful I think the way that people tend to to use pneumonics is not really great I'm going to give it a b um and it can be really powerful again I'll talk about how we can upgrade that it's pretty simple next one listening to music okay uh listening to music like really depends on the type of music you listen to but also depending on the type of thinking you're doing while you're listening to that music and I've read through I'd say a fair amount of research on the effect of listening to music and it's still pretty like like kind of ambiguous um you might be surprised to realize that generally speaking it doesn't seem to have any real beneficial impact like more often than not listening to music of any kind tends to produce worse performance and there are some individuals that are exceptions but when you look at studies across like a wide group of people it doesn't tend to consistently make people better in fact again it makes people worse more often so I'm probably going to give this actually a d because I think a lot of people really love listening to music when they study because they think it's helping them but actually it's probably not and and I'll explain the reason why you probably think it's helping even when it's not uh in a moment okay the next one is Cornell note taking if you're not familiar with cornal note taking it's basically just like a templated sheet of how to take notes where involves like writing your notes on one side writing some keywords on the other and then creating like a summary at the bottom it's almost like a combination of like creating summary pages and to a certain level like a like a findan technique esque feel to it on a single piece of paper I give Cornell note taking a like a thumbs up for the fact that it was a very early popular method of note taking that got people to start thinking about how they can write notes in a more strategic way there's really no way that you can do cor out note taking wrong because it's just very easy to do um but like many techniques that are just straight up easy to do it's like there's limited benefits it's probably at the same level as I'd say a summary page actually I'm going to give it a b tier I'm going to give it higher than summary pages and the reason is because when you use cor out not taking it makes you think about being more concise during the learning event itself like it's not I'm just going to write all the stuff down and then come back to it like 3 days later and then try to create a summary page out of it you're forced to summarize and synthesize and condense immediately and that makes a big difference to your your processing power uh so for that reason I'm going to give it higher than summary pages okay mind maps you probably know if you're watching this video and you got caught by the algorithm for the first time in which case welcome you probably know that mind maps are like I'm a big proponent of doing mind maps but I also have talked about multiple times how the way most people use mind Maps is really ineffective like it's barely any better and sometimes just worse than writing straight up linear notes so I will painfully probably actually give my maps a c like it really is not helping most people that are mind mathing and I and it's most it's actually completely because the point of how to do mind maps in the right way is missed because it's it's not just about doing it like you can create as many mind maps as you want but if the way that you're creating them is not in a certain way then you will find that is very very ineffective and just timec consuming and messy and like honestly completely pointless like you would it would be 100% better just to create like a set of notion notes or like a zetoc Casten type thing instead of doing my maps and an incorrect technique the power only comes through where it becomes way better than all those other techniques when you learn to do it the right way and the final one lucky last uh rereading and highlighting I mean this just plainly sucks like it's just terrible I I don't know what else to say about this like this there so little benefit from doing this and it it's it's so hard to make it work in a way that's not worse for you so that's a d if there was an e it would be an e so that's the tier list part one all right so that was part one based on the way that people normally use these techniques and in part two I'm going to go through how we can modify it and upgrade them so that we can make them even better if you like this format let me know in the comments and if there's any techniques that you want me to go over then also let me know as well but otherwise thank you for watching and I'll see you in part two