A study method shown to be effective is

So with exams quickly approaching, I’m sure you’ve been fretting over how you will be able to remember everything before D-day. But have you ever taken the time to think about the most effective way to study?

Most people never take the time to reflect on their learning techniques.

Too often, we process information on automatic, mindlessly skimming the pre-reading, going along to lectures when we’re overtired, not fully immersing ourselves in the learning experience. We say, “I’ll go over that again before the exam”.

However even when we do study, many of the learning methods we typically favour such as highlighting and rereading text, are very ineffective. These methods don’t help improve understanding or allow us to draw links between concepts.

Fortunately, psychological research has uncovered the best strategies for studying.

This blog post intends to share and explain why you should consider adopting these strategies. By understanding the benefits and research behind them, you will hopefully be inspired to change your habits.

Spaced Practice

Don’t try to cram and learn everything the night before. This is why a week after the exam, all that content has seemingly “vanished” from our brains.

Learning new things physically changes the brains structure by creating new neural connections and strengthening old ones. This is known as neuroplasticity.

In order to learn concepts effectively and embed them in our memory, it is better to study in small chunks over a longer period of time. “Every time you leave a little space, you forget a bit of the information, and then you kind of relearn it,” explains cognitive psychologist Yana Weinstein. “That forgetting actually helps you to strengthen the memory.”

Seems counterintuitive, but in actual fact, forgetting helps to strengthen the memory by allowing yourself to learn and remember the facts again.

This happens because our brain is much better at encoding information into our synapses in small, repeated intervals as opposed to in one large sitting. Synapses are the biological mechanism that help us to remember things by connecting and strengthening pathways in our brain. If we space out our studying over time rather than cram it all into a single session, then we are engaging multiple sets of synapses, as opposed to just one.

Although cramming can help you get through that exam, the material will quickly disappear from your memory as you exit the exam hall. If you want to remember content for longer periods of time; study in short bursts regularly over a few days, weeks or even months.

Retrieval Practice

How often have you spent wasted a two hour study session just rereading notes? This technique has been proven by researchers to be one of the least effective methods of learning.

Having the information that we are trying to master right at our fingertips doesn’t actually force us to retrieve it from memory. We trick ourselves into thinking that we know it, when in fact it is just sitting in our short term memory.

In order to better engage our brain, we should consciously bring information to mind without support materials.

One way to practice this is to simply take out a blank sheet of paper and sketch or draw as much as possible from memory. By doing this, we are also changing the way the information is stored in our brains which makes retrieving it later even easier.

Flash cards are also a great tool for this technique. The mere act of thinking about the information will strengthen that knowledge. And the more often you do this, the better it will engrain in your memory.

So next time, don’t waste your precious study time by rereading notes in order to memorise them. Constantly test yourself and bring the information to mind to bolster your memory.

Intentional Learning

How often do you use phrases when learning like “I know the quadratic formula”, “I don’t know all 20 amino acids”. Studying to “know” things is actually a fairly shallow learning experience. We tend to not maintain the information in our brain for very long, which undermines the whole purpose of learning. If instead, we approached studying with the intention to remember that knowledge for years to come, then we will boost our capacity to retain the information in the first place.

A way to achieve this is to try learning content with the intention of having to teach it.

In a recent study, psychology researcher John Nestojko found that by simply informing his students that they’d later have to teach the content, it caused a shift in their mindset. He noticed those students engaged with the material in a more effective way, compared to their peers who were simply expecting a test.

Doing so helps to organise the information in our brain in a more logical, coherent way. It also helps us understand the main points and ignore irrelevant facts.

Effective studying? I think so.

Metacognition

So it’s all well and good to use try out these strategies, but a key difference between average students and successful ones is their ability to exercise metacognition.

Jargon aside, metacognition is simply thinking about our own thinking. More precisely, exercising metacognition is when we intentionally plan, observe, and assess our processes and performance.

Research shows that the ability to critically analyse how we think influences how we approach tasks and what strategies we use to problem solve. It helps us to identify our own strengths and weaknesses, and make amendments to our approach accordingly. Metacognition also affects our ability to apply knowledge beyond the immediate context in which it is learnt, which is the ultimate goal of learning.

So I guess could say it’s pretty important.

We can improve our metacognition by being reflective and self-aware during all stages of learning and studying. Try asking yourself questions such as “What am I trying to achieve?” “Am I on the right track?” “How can I improve my approach?” “What is working for me?”

You will notice that by reflecting on your progress, you will be more motivated to achieve your study goals, more aware of your performance and more confident when doing assessments.

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Remember that studying effectively is not a matter of chance. It is only through intentional engagement with content, bringing that information to mind regularly over short, interspaced sessions and reflecting on our thinking, that we learn to study effectively. Taking a scientific approach to studying really is a no-brainer.

Further information:

Cover image via Pixabay

Page 2

I was in a fancy café awhile back, eating a very fancily arranged egg on toast. Here’s my attempt to portrait my dining experience in Instagram style.

And I thought to myself, “If we never learnt how to cook, this indulgent experience would never have existed in the first place!” And the thought itself terrified me.

But, why did we started to cook our food anyway?

We are the only animal that cooks our food.
Cooking allowed us to become human, in both biological and evolutionary sense. Primatologist, Richard Wrangham famously championed this idea. He said, above all else, “Cooking is what made us human”. His theory suggested that humanity was created by the Homo erectus learning to cook 1.8 million years ago. Cooking gave us the edge in evolution because it leads to smaller teeth, reduced gut size and most importantly, bigger brain.

Cooked food fed our growing brains and created a lot of free time.

The success of human culture and evolution is because of our remarkably advance brain. It consumes 1/5 of our calories intake. In fact, human has an enormous brain for our body size when compared to other primates, like the Chimpanzee, who spends more than half of their day eating.
You can see the differences between different primates and us from this picture below:

We don’t need to constantly chew plants for energy because we found another way to gain more energy out of food. Part of that is thanks to hunting and eating large animals, but also to tools that allowed us to cut meat from large animal carcasses and break bones to get at their calorie-rich marrow.

After cooking, food becomes more digestible and less prone to poisoning.

Our ancestors didn’t just eat meat alone. In fact, raw plants were still the predominant food source, but some of these vegetables were cooked.
When cooking plants, the heat breaks down their tough cell walls, which lets them release most of their nutrients. Cooking also makes them easier to chew and even sometimes deactivates toxin in plants.
Not only that, heat denature or unwinds proteins, which allows our bodies to digest them more comfortably. Paleontologists proposed that our ancestor got access to more food, and more energy by cooking previous inedible plants.

Cooking have the same protein-breaking effect on meat and meat products too; you can see this when you cook an egg, it goes from clear to white.

When you put a steak on the grill, the fat on the meat starts melting out.
The heat from the fire causes the steak to lose some calories, but it also makes that piece of meat easier to chew. If you were to eat that steak raw, you had to use up to about a quarter of the energy from that steak to digest it.

Cooking is more than just putting the meat over a fire.

Cooking could also mean crushing food into a more edible form or preserving food by breaking it down with salt. It could also mean cutting it into pieces and drying it in the sun.
In fact, cooking had become complex. It intertwines with our cultures, out history and even our sense of belonging.

We ate our way to become a stronger species.

But, it is not how much we ate; it is how we transform the food we can eat. As the hours spent on getting enough calories lessen, we have more time to do things like developing languages, invent tool and write blogs in hipsters’ cafe.

And I am here to celebrate that, with a video of me cooking.