this is undoubtedly the best way to learn and it can be broken down into four simple stages number one priming number two in-class notes number three post class immediate review and number four revision if you're able to execute all four stages as I teach you in this video you will get the best grades that you've ever gotten while spending a fraction of the time my name is June you if you're new to the channel welcome if you're returning welcome back I am a Deans List biomed engineering student getting both my bachelors and my masters at the same time with a neuroengineering concentration I've been very blessed to have a lot of academic success while taking such advanced classes and mind you many of them simultaneously all throughout this time I've also been able to start successful businesses still have a social life go to the gym consistently been able to spend time with with my faith and create content consistently you can do it too if you wish you're able to study effectively and efficiently and I'm so sorry that nobody has taught you up to this point but don't worry cuz I got you you don't have to wait any longer to stick around and enjoy the video stage one priming the main objective here is to understand the big picture of the topic before going into our classes why well it's because our brain's ability to deeply understand and then remember a piece of information is greatly improved when there are more relevant connections to it so by going into our classes already having understood how the major Concepts fit together in this topic all the new pieces of detail that will be taught to us in class immediately becomes relevant immediately has meaning because because it serves a function in that bigger picture a great analogy that I love to use is building a Lego set last weekend I had spent with my girlfriend doing an orchid flower Lego set and it was a really good time I think everyone loves Legos priming is equivalent to me studying the front of the Box before ever opening it up as I look at the front of the box as I look at that picture I see that the flower head has has distinct features so does the stem and so does the soil and so does the pot so when I open up the box and I'm greeted by hundreds of pieces no longer are those pieces irrelevant meaningless separate from one another no actually instead I'm able to immediately understand how that white circular piece serves a function in the flower head and how the green cylindrical piece serves a function in the stem and how the brown Square pieces serves a function in the pot and how all of those pieces relate to each other in that big picture so I was going through the instructions very quickly and I was skipping a lot of the steps because they were intuitive to me right I already understood it in terms of what was its importance by the time I finished I done it in about 30 minutes which is a lot quicker than the time allotted for it but think about what would have happened if I completely skipped the front of the box if I thought that I was too good for it and I just went straight to the pieces then all those pieces become irrelevant right none of those pieces have meaning to me so then I have to hyper fixate on each singular step each singular piece I have to think how is this important and by the time you look at it and you understand it and you're done analyzing it you've probably already forgotten how the previous pieces have built what you have gotten so far and then you have absolutely no idea how your current piece is relevant in terms of the following steps so it becomes much more laborious it becomes a much more inefficient process so you want to do priming now I thought it was important that I give a more applicable example here for us to follow together and I will definitely be doing a video in which I go over an example from my own class in neurology but when I was going through that example I realized that some of those Concepts may be completely unfamiliar to the general audience and because of that I feel that the example wasn't necessarily as meaningful to you so instead what I will be doing is going through an example of me learning about the topic of fashion we all love fashion we all know about it at least a little bit right so I think that this example will be more applicable and then a future video I'll go ahead and do something more related to my own studies my brother is actually really amazing with his Styles he's been way better than me for our whole lives and I've learned a lot from him but I'm still very very new to caring about fashion and so I called him up and I said I really need to up my dress game and I would love it if you could teach me about fashion he agreed and so for this upcoming weekend what we'll do is sit down he said for about an hour and a half he'll go over everything that I need to know so as I'm learning this new topic I can actually Prime for it and what I'll do is I will identify some some resources that I can supplement for this priming stage and so for our situation our scenario let's do YouTube videos right and so what I've done is go through just a few popular YouTube videos about fashion and I've noted while I was going in 2x speed right because I don't necessarily care about the details here I'm just noting repeated words point of emphasis and I'm creating a list of key Concepts so if you look here these were a few of those key Concepts this is my list the term casual the term thickness length layering formal bold and simple now in this list as they currently stand they're still isolated from each other they don't necessarily have meaning this is just like seeing those Lego pieces without ever having looked at the front of the Box casual is a completely irrelevant piece thickness is irrelevant and so forth so what I want to do is go through the next step of creating groups and so for me using my own prior knowledge I'm thinking that I can compare these key Concepts to each other and identify some similarities so I see the terms bold and simple they're similar right I can categorize them in a group called colors and the terms layering length and thickness they're similar and I can group them under a term called season and formal and Casual are similar as they describe occasions so these are three groups that I've now created and you start to see that this has more meaning this is an example of chunking information down by the way and as I see it in this group I'll take it A F step further because still these groups are isolated from each other so what I have to next do is ask myself this really important question of how is this topic relevant to me well I don't necessarily care about Runway shows or I don't even know if that's what they call fashion shows that's not of my interest right my personal interest is I just want to look decently good when I'm picking out an outfit for my day that's all so for me it's relevant to create relationships and organize these groups in a way in which it helps me pick out a good outfit right so again with my prior knowledge and how I apply this to a situation that's relevant to me I believe that I will start with the occasion because that's the first thought in my head why am I dressing up in the first place is it because I am going to school or a business meeting or hang out with friends and then I think about season are we currently in the winner right now I probably don't want to be going out in shorts and then lastly colors do I want to be bold with my color Choice do I want to go with bright colors or do I want to go a little bit more monotone that's how I have crafted the relationships and and then what I'll do is literally visually create a diagram for myself and it's so helpful that I do this because this is truly the big picture of the topic as I've understood it up to this point these are how the major Concepts fit together in the big picture and this will set me up for a lot of success moving on and we'll go into how that literally does that but this is how I Envision it right occasion is situated near the top right because that's the first thing I believe that's probably the most important thing for me and then I go into season and then I go into colors it's a very very simplified version of what I believe the topic is going to further entail but I now understand how the new details as I go into class will fit what I'll do next and this is part two of the priming stage I will take a very short preest very short perhaps just five questions or so and what this is going to help you do is further analyze how these different concepts come together to now solve problems because when you go and take your exams later on they won't be regurgitation questions they're not going to be definition questions as you get into higher education the type of testing that you will go through are ones that have inference-based questions so they require synthesis of knowledge they require you to apply and compare and contrast and analyze and so as you go ahead and give your first exposure to this this is your opportunity to give a genuine attempt it doesn't mean that you have to get these questions right by any means it's your attempt to see how these different concepts come together and even if you get those questions wrong you'll make use of the hypercorrection effect during class but this again is all these both parts are all aiming to form a big picture understanding of the topic before we go into our classes I have to make a really big point of emphasis here because I know exactly what you're thinking to yourself you're saying June I thought you were going to teach me how to learn more efficiently you want me to do this every single time before my classes that's going to take me forever that's so unrealistic and what I have to tell you is that you're only going through the priming stage once every two three weeks for each of your classes why because you're doing this based on topics you're not doing this on a class basis a lot of professors do a really good job of making this clear but you will have course objectives that are spread across several classes it's because each class's information that is presented to you is restricted is limited to the amount of time that's available for that class so usually the information that needs to be covered in that curriculum is a lot more than just just a 60-minute 90-minute class so you'll have it spread across four or five classes across the span of 2 3 weeks right if you find yourself trying to prime before every single one of your classes that simply means that you must broaden the scope of what you are priming for think to yourself okay what are the upcoming classes material and how do they all fit together and I bet if you go ahead and create more general terms for the next four or five class and you go to your your professor and say hey this is how I've termed how I've described the first 3 weeks of class material and then this next 3 weeks of material and so forth they'll help you and tell you if that's right or wrong but usually you're able to use your textbooks and they follow a certain Cadence that it's obvious what topics are but just remember that so imagine spending just an hour and a half of priming on a weekend and setting yourself up for so so much success in the next 2 3 weeks it's a no-brainer it's an absolute must because again we'll go into how much it's going to help you in the following stages what I'll do now is show on the screen a list of instructions for the priming stage it's pretty much exactly what I just showed you for me learning the topic of fashion but of course there's going to be some differences pause the screen snapshot it and try to implement for your upcoming topic stage two inclass notes because you've gone through the prime stage you will have so much success in this next stage you see you will be able to actually listen to the teacher not be nose deep into your notes I know what You' have been doing up to this point I know that you are writing every little thing that the teacher is saying but you and I both know how ineffective that's been for you right because of two main reasons one you can't write as quickly as your teacher speaks and two you're not actively engaging with the material so no meaningful learning is actually occurring so it's just a big waste of time that whole class period becomes a big waste of time you see so many people try to write every little thing but they forget that learning doesn't happen on that piece of paper so just because you wrote it all doesn't mean that it actually processed in your brain instead your notes should just be a way of facilitating the process of learning that's happening in your brain now because we've gone ahead and created this diagram for you you know what you're going to do you're going to spend a majority of that time literally annotating on top of that diagram number one why do you remember what we said in the beginning about how our brain's ability to deeply understand and then remember a piece of information is greatly improved when there are relevant connections to it well that's what we're doing in real time automatically so as we're introduced to all these new details right instead of fixating on each piece of information instead we already have the big picture understanding we understand how that new piece of information is relevant we understand the function it serves in the big picture that diagram number one is your big picture so you can literally create additional branches additional subgroups as you see fit and take in information this way so this is great because you're not going to be writing every little thing that the teacher is saying you're literally jotting down main points for you to remember in relation to that big picture in relation to other relevant pieces of information and this is extremely extremely effective so if I was to show you what my inclass notes look like this is diagram number two this is it and it's beautiful right and so you see in blue everything that I had done in my diagram number one you have still the occasion you still have the season you still have the colors but as I am in that meeting with my brother and he's teaching me about all the details and really making big points of emphasis I'm adding additional groups I'm putting them in certain appc ation that help emphasize its importance and so as he speaks about how it's really important to feel good in what you're wearing because it makes you feel confident right as he's talking about my body type and my Silhouette and my skin tone how that affects how I'm going to choose an outfit I'm going to put that in the beginning because I think that that's probably the most important he starts to add some more details about what type of colors there are right there are certain patterns you could be monochromatic you can have certain coordination but I also start to see that hey maybe these relationships weren't organized in the right way so I'm annotating literally on top of this diagram at the same time there are two other parts that are happening right so while I'm annotating the second part is for me to have just a few key observations these key observations are basically really big points of emphasis that the teacher is saying to you that you don't necessarily understand how to fit onto your diagram at that time you don't want to waste time trying to force it into your diagram at this point just put a list of key observations and you'll get back to it this is just so that you really don't miss the crucial Pieces Just because you don't necessarily know how to it fits then the third part of your in-class notes are active recall questions this is a golden gem this is a must you must do this for those that are unfamiliar with active recall perhaps you hadn't seen my previous content on in Instagram that's okay there's a lot of resources out there that talk about active recall the guy to academic success also talks about active recall I'll give a very simplified version of this but this has been a learning principle a learning strategy that has been widely studied the research has shown that it is so effective in terms of facilitating your learning so at its basic form without going into the studies or any of the details I can totally make another video about that if you guys want active recall is forcefully retrieving the information out of your brain without the source of the material in front of you and we will talk about how that's such an integral part of your revision and why that is so much more beneficial in comparison to passive techniques but here you are setting yourself up so that you have a list of questions to practice with later these are questions that you're making this just basically able to even happen because you had have this increased bandwidth since you've done the priming session right most people are so nose deep into their notes that they don't even have time to create questions that are important for their review later but because you now have the time most of your time is just spent listening to the teacher you're going to start jotting down some questions and these are really why and how questions predominantly why is this piece of information important how can this information be applied how can it be related to things that I've learned before How can I alter a variable so that it changes the outcome what's a real life example of this these are the types of questions that you're trying to ask yourself and a lot of times teachers do a really good job of asking you questions as they go throughout the lecture this is another place for you to just write these down so now in your inclass notes you would have an annotated diagram number two you will have key observations just a few things jotted down that you couldn't necessarily fit into your diagram and then number three you'll have your list of active recall questions that probably takes up 10% of your attention while you are going throughout the process of being in class and learning the information 90% of it should be focused on your teacher it should be focused on giving your teacher eye contact and being present and going through these types of thoughts in your brain I promise you this is so much more effective than again trying to write every little thing down that the teacher says so that wraps up up stage two I know for a fact that you have way more responsibilities than just school and rightfully so you should have time for your social life your hobbies your passions and of course your career development so how do you fit in all of those things well the guide to academic success goes over just that it first starts off with evidence-based revision techniques so focused on stage four and the notable mentions of this video and then it goes with productivity tips followed by personal advice directly from me to you so that you're able to stand out not just inside of the classroom but also outside of it as well and then lastly Career Development tips specifically with resume writing and interviews with the aim of helping you secure your dream internships the guide to academic success has helped thousands of students in just the last few months and it's been an absolute dream come true a surreal experience to be able to help you guys through that and there is no better time for you to get yours than now because four Black Friday we are announcing our biggest sale ever at 40% off 40% off but it is for a limited time so make sure you secure yours at that price by clicking the link below thank you guys so much for your support and with all that being said let's return back to the video stage three post class immediate review this is a much more concise revision period versus what you'll do more extensively later in stage 4 this is literally just about 30 minutes before you go to bed that night and what you'll do is clean up your active recall questions from class this is your time to slightly clean up the diagram number two that you've made in class and maybe start to add some of those key observations into your framework now that you have some more time and space mentally to do it but majority of this stage is going to be spent practicing your active recall questions and you don't even need to write out the answers I found a lot of times that this has big waste of time because if you don't know the answer to a certain question you can always go back to your presentations or the textbook to find a much more thorough answer with the neighboring information so that's not a problem so you can do this verbally right you can go through your questions and the main objective here is to identify your strengths and weaknesses up to this point in time so the questions you do get right using active recall Force y retrieving that information out of your brain you've made that even a deeper strength for you you've deepened your understanding and you've deepened your memory for those active recall questions that you might have got wrong great you found areas of weakness for yourself that you can practice later in stage 4 but again because you've gone through the process of stage one and stage two and you've really made use of those learning experiences you'll find that a lot of those active recall questions you can get right so it's important that you spend just about 30 minutes before you go to bed doing this it will make an absolute world's Difference by the time you get into stage four the final stage stage number four revision it's interesting because this is probably where most of your time is currently spent most of you are probably so fixated on studying the material after your classes have ended and you're cramming a week or two weeks before your exam and you find that you're not doing that well on your exams you're finding that you're wasting a lot of that time right because we all know that the efficiency of your studying declines if you are studying for such extensive periods of time so that's a very inefficient way of doing this and this is actually where you save a bulk of your time so stage four consists of two parts and this is doing revision the right way not using p passive techniques but really utilizing the powers of active recall using the powers of chunking information creating these relationships the first part is creating diagram number three this is your optimized version it's your ability to reorganize and then simplify what you've already created in your diagrams one and two we saw how the one in class got a little bit messy you probably added some more information since then but here you want to make it so that it becomes an invaluable resource for you how do you do that you you make it so that you go back to this diagram and immediately you understand the knowledge that it's trying to portray if you have to look at the diagram and spend 30 40 minutes just trying to make out the words and trying to understand why these relationships are crossing over one another it's not a good resource anymore so what you want to do and what I'll show you for this example of learning the topic of fashion is start to make use of different subgroups so for personal I've created the subgroups of physical of perception of preference and in them I have all these different types of detail right so I have body type skin tone silhouette and then perception I've confidence and mood and in preference I have styles and so now it's organized in a way in which for me it's easier to understand and more relevant to me I've made use of illustrations so as my brother is going through the different patterns he's really gone over four essential ones which were monochromatic which were plaid which were striped and which were polka dots and because I'm organizing this in a way in which I can actually pick out a good outfit for myself I thought it made sense for me to draw them out in the order in which I prefer right I heavily prefer monochromatic as you can see in my shirt right now and then plaid and then stripe and then polka dots are really not something that I like and then I go ahead and I start to bold certain relationships I start to realize okay my personal choice is actually very very important as it leads to the colors selection and I've reorganized some of these groups I've created multiple relationships with two groups right so I've created a relationship from occasion to season and then season to Vacation I've created illustrations here and so when you look at this for me I can immediately understand the knowledge is trying to portray in an instant I look at this and I'm thinking I I know exactly what I learned in that meeting with my brother that's what you're aiming to do with diagram number three you're trying to make this a resource for yourself and it will become really beneficial as we go into part number two of this final stage and that is your active free call applications and the three that we're going to go in in this order are one the blurting method two the findan technique and three practice test we've just talked about how important active recall is and now that I'm speaking about I really do think that active recall deserves its own video so I'll be looking to do that but first you're going to start with blurting and there's a lot of videos on YouTube that will teach you how to do this but in terms of a general understanding I can give that to you right now first you identify what your Source material is going to be so that could could be your textbook or this could be a recorded lecture you're going to pick a part of that source that you want to learn at the time and then after reading the textbook or watching the lecture you're going to put that Source away you're not going to look at it you're going to completely remove it you're going to then grab a blank sheet of paper and write out everything that you can freely recall from your Source you'll find that this is really hard trying to forcefully retrieve information out of your brain is going to require deliberate effort but it's actually that effort that leads to meaningful learning so be patient as you go throughout this process practically you'll remember certain pieces of information and inevitably there will be gaps but the amazing part here is that because you've gone through the process of creating these diagrams you have such a good understanding of how the major Concepts relate to one another you've created so many of these linkages as you've learned the material in the first place that when you go to fill in the gaps a lot of those things will naturally start to make sense and so as you go throughout this process you'll find that you'll actually recall a lot more that if you hadn't created any of the diagrams if you hadn't gone through the previous stage you might have remember maybe 10 15% your first attempt but actually you'll find that you have a really good Baseline here you might after attempt number one recall 60% after you go through that process you'll open up your Source again and make Corrections right you might have forgotten some things you might have made certain incorrect statements you'll fix them and then after you've done that and gone through the process of correcting it you'll crumble up attempt number one that piece of paper and throw it out cuz you're not going to use it anymore go take a break go do something else and then return for attempt number two you'll find that attempt number two you'll do a lot better you'll probably be around 70 75% perhaps and then by the time you get into your third attempt perhaps you've recalled everything that you need to recall maybe you're at close to 90 95% once you get to that point you're good I think the blurting method is a really good starting place for your active recall it forces you to try and recall freely as much that you possibly remember and in doing so you'll have a really good indication of again what things you're able to readily often remember and then some things that you still need a little bit of work on after you go through that that process you'll move into the finement technique as your second active recall application and this requires you to teach the topic as if the person receiving the information was someone at the level of fifth grader right but where people make a mistake is they think that the fing technique is all about just simplifying the information and although that's a really important role just because you simplified it doesn't guarantee that one it'll be accurate or two that the person listening can actually understand it right and so there's more to it you're probably going to have to reorganize the groups and the major Concepts in a way that will make more sense to someone that is hearing this for the first time that might not have any type of background in this field and your also probably going to need examples and analogies and applications or scenarios to make it more relevant to that fifth grader so perhaps if I'm teaching the topic of fashion I'm saying hey you know that dance that you got upcoming for the winner you want to pick out a really good outfit right like this is how this is how you should do it you can literally create that explanation and make it relevant through that application and you'll find that you will naturally if you do this verbally alloud you will hesitate on areas that you're weak on right or perhaps you can record yourself or have somebody listen to you as you do this and they'll give you the feedback and they'll tell you actually I didn't understand this part and perhaps you had an assumption that it was an obvious more intuitive element that didn't need any more explanation but somebody gave you the feedback or you listened to your recording and thought actually I could have done a better job of explaining that that's another area of weakness and so again the Baseline of you starting this because you've gone through the previous stages will be very high and just a few iterations of this you should be really in a good place to then start the third application which are practice tests and I think that practice tests are probably the best resource that you can use to narrow down what you need to study for your exam right because if you can utilize exams from past years you have a lot of clues in terms of content emphasis in terms of perhaps trick questions or things to look out for and maybe certain things that you don't necessarily need to study because it's not on this past Year's exams but there's a right way to do these practice exams and again I think that each of these active recall applications deserve their own video and now that I'm going through this maybe I should do them but I'll tell you what you shouldn't do and this is what most people do unfortunately is they'll go and read the question they'll take a guess at it and then read the answer immediately and then even if it's not necessarily identical or exactly what they were going to say they just say things along the lines of that's good enough or that's what I meant but the problem is if your teacher is giving you the past Year's exam it's almost for certain that it's not going to be the exact same question so if you're not able to understand why an answer is correct or why the other answers are incorrect then by the time that question is reframed on your exam you're not going to know how to solve them right so as you approach a question you should really take the time to freely recall put your sources away don't look things up right now you've done a lot of the learning already so here you're trying to review and trying to pull the information out of your brain and give as exhaustive and answers possible you're going to circle the ones that you think are right or write out the short-ended answers but at the same time focus on okay these answers are wrong because X Y and Z right you're also going to provide those explanations thoroughly and if you really really do get stuck then you can go into your diagram right you can look at your diagram and see if that can help you answer the question because that's a Quee that you've created that's how you've learned the material and then at the very end if you really have no idea how to solve this problem then you can go ahead and look at your sources to find um a way to exhaustively answer it and then you'll remember that answer you'll notate it some somewhere so that you'll have it for reference in the future because obviously that was a really big area of weakness for you so those three applications of utilizing active recall have now made you prepare and again these are just a few iterations for each of these three applications right perhaps you do two bluring rounds you do two fan technique rounds and then you go through one previous year's exam but because you've already already learned the information properly the first time around because you've been able to deeply process access the information the first time around through all the linkages that you've created right through creating groups and relating those groups in a way that's relevant to you this is where you save a lot of your time I promise you that with that being said that should wrap up all four stages of the Learning System but to be honest for me personally I definitely believe there should be more attention and time spent for each of the stages because there's so many important nuances that I had to overlook due to the time but really the purpose of today's video was to Simply introduce to all of you the four stages and provide you all enough information so that one you value each of the stages and two you can start applying it right away to your own coursework I promise as you really grapple with the stages and you overcome the initial learning curve the benefits will be more than worth it you will be getting the best grades while studying for a fraction of the time so I urge you to try it out yourself there's a lot of notable mentions here too specifically in regards to a revision timetable you should be including space repetition in or leaving along with optimal breaks and including these three things in your revision Tim tables are absolutely essential so this is more of how do you implement the Learning System across the span of a term to go into each of those will also be really extensive so perhaps we'll just save that for another video but if you've read the guide to academic success you know exactly what I'm talking about it's really unfortunate that all school does is tell us what to learn instead of ever teaching us how to learn it but hopefully I was able to do that for you in this video or at least start the journey for you as you craft your own Learning System if you've stayed to this part of the video thank you so much you're definitely an important part of this community hopefully you understand understand how important this Learning System is for me as I've spent the last several years trying to teach people how to learn and really providing hopefully a little bit of guidance to a lot of my fellow students and so I've been working on a project behind the scenes that hopefully will serve as your everyday tool as it facilitates this Learning System I'm really excited about it I'm not ready just yet to announce it but at the very least hopefully this video gave you the information to start it yourself and in the future if if that's something that you're interested in I'd be looking forward to seeing your thoughts on that as well thank you guys so much please leave your comments below if you've learned anything if you want to ask any questions I'd be happy to respond to them of course leave a like And subscribe until next time take care and as always I'll see you at the [Music] top