9 ms·

How to Study (2016)

314 points by colobas 10y ago

pragone 10y ago
This is a fascinating subject that I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about, as I've continually tried to improve my studying habits in these first two years of medical school. There's some great points here. One for discussion that I'd disagree with is copying your notes. Here in medical school, it's literally temporally impossible to copy your notes and actually get to all the material. It's definitely an extremely effective way to learn the material, but unfortunately when you have so much material in so little time, it's just not feasible (FWIW, an average semester has 25 credits of courses for me). I'd also add in spaced repetition studying - this has been an extremely effective method of studying for me, and I've learned more via spaced repetition studying of previously made flashcards than I have from reading the textbooks. And it does a phenomenal job of isolating the material you need to know from what you already know.
- kendallpark 10y ago
  > Here in medical school, it's literally temporally impossible to copy your notes and actually get to all the material. I second this. My med school strat is as follows: I write questions in Workflowy during lecture based on what I think could be tested from the lecture. Then I import them into a SRS app I built and drill them all the week before exams. Works pretty well.
  - pragone 10y ago
    I don't have lectures, so I have the tedious job of trying to pick out the relevant material straight from the textbooks. Let's just say Bro's cards (https://github.com/enlightenedchampagne/Brosencephalon https://github.com/enlightenedchampagne/Brosencephalon) is a real lifesaver. (Unfortunately my school tends to test some not-board-relevant material and also not test board-specific material, so it's hit and miss, but I've been doing alright so far.)
- dhimes 10y ago
  Email me (in my profile). I have something I'd like for you to look at.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  After a CS degree (2 decades ago) and many hundreds of hours and courses on medical topics over the last few years, I think studying medicine and fields like engineering or math are very different though, and what works in one may not be the best idea for the other. A lot of memorizing in medicine, like neural pathways, (bio)chemical pathways, location of nuclei in the brain, anatomy (of course), regulatory circuits. You learn everything to "debug" one concrete instance of a biological being, and although variations exist in comparison to all that could be (or even what there is, looking at all animals) it's very little, and it doesn't change (beyond the inherent variation, which only seems great because you are looking at only humans so any deviations appear greater than they are without the perspective of "all possible biological systems" for comparison). Engineers learn existing systems - and many kinds of them - to be able to create new ones. Medical doctors instead work on only one already existing systems. Engineers can experiment and fail, many times. Medical doctors should "do no harm" first of all. So that limits the creativity and determines how you learn from the outset. Therefore which methods work will also be different.
  - pragone 9y ago
    Having studied both at this point, I'd agree. I think most of my learning in CS tends to be experimentation - write some programs, see why they don't work. Sure, there's some things you need to memorize and understand, but that knowledge is strongly reinforced through experimentation.
- pitt1980 10y ago
  out of curiosity " previously made flashcards " are you taking the time to make them yourself, or are you using source that made them for you?
  - pragone 9y ago
    I'm using previously made cards by another individual. A reddit user named brosencephalon when through First Aid* (2015 I think?) and made about 13000 Anki cards for everything in it. It's been extremely popular on the r/medicalschool subreddit, with multiple people saying they did well on boards as a result. -- * First Aid: First Aid for the USMLE, published every year. It's basically the bible for medical students preparing for the board exams (namely, the USMLE, or US Medical Licensing Exam, of which there are 3 parts. The first one is taken at the end of the 2nd year of medical school.)
nxc18 10y ago
This has a lot of great stuff, but I hereby dispute the 'don't take notes on a computer' claims. It is certainly true that typing out notes is generally a bad idea. I have and can take notes on a computer while basically unconscious and getting no benefit from them; transcription is easier than and a distinct activity from taking notes. However, with pen computing, the computer becomes a very useful note taking tool. I can write out my notes in OneNote while recording the lecture. If I miss something or want clarification, I can go back and listen to the lecture, linked up by time with the notes I took. I can go back and search my notes - they are useful for quickly reviewing a topic I may have studied in the past. I like color coding my notes. I can write in any color, recolor after the fact if I want a different structure, and generally add multiple channels of cues for my studying. Digital ink & paper have potential to replace physical notes without the negatives of typing.
- dkarl 10y ago
  I certainly hope this happens. It has always been frustrating to me that with note-taking I have to choose one or the other. I can take handwritten notes to help me remember, or I can type notes for later reading and searching. There are aspects to each that I regret losing when I choose the other.
  - nobodyorother 10y ago
    If you have the time, choose both: write them out and then review and revise them as you write them up.
Kenji 10y ago
I didn't see it mentioned anywhere on this page, but for memorizing, there is one very important insight. How well you remember something directly correlates with how interesting and important you find it. As if your brain is a cache that evicts data based on this priority. If you manage to manipulate yourself into believing that the study material is very important, you can memorize incredible amounts of data. Well, the optimal case would be if it's actually important stuff, of course! If you start thinking "why does this even matter", the memories instantly start to decompose. Also, at uni, I learned that taking notes in maths classes is a recipe for disaster. How come? The mere act of writing down and arranging formulas on my sheet takes enough thinking power that I can no longer follow the lecture. What's better, having one single good shot at understanding things, or having not understood things and the incomprehensible scribbling of your notes also makes zero sense without the professor's explanation? The former for me. As long as I know the broad subject names, I can read up on my own.
- linkregister 10y ago
  One way to attend math lectures is to have already read the chapter in the textbook and attempted to understand it. That way, the lecture addresses the gaps in your knowledge and you can ask questions. This time-intensive strategy might be suboptimal in the long run if it reduces the time available for doing homework / sample problems, which is almost certainly the most effective way to actually learn the material.
- ashark 10y ago
  I had an otherwise excellent (if infamously uptight) calculus teacher in high school whose one mistake more than undid everything she did right: she insisted that everyone take extensive notes. She also moved quickly though materials and examples, making the problem worse. It ruined the class.
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janwillemb 10y ago
I wish someone would have taught me how to study at school or in university. I somehow managed, but I'm still intimidated and slightly panicking whenever I have to learn/memorize something: I simply don't know how.
- anon_temp_2404 10y ago
  Memorizing is a learnable skill, like anything else. There are lots of tricks you can use that eventually become second nature. A good starting point might be the book "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer. If you want to remember names easily check out Harry Lorayne. There's a YouTube video titled "Harry Lorayne memorizes audience's names" where he demonstrates his abilities. I started using his method recently and found it works well. But as with anything else you have to explore and figure out which methods work best for you. Good luck.
- JusticeJuice 10y ago
  Memorization depends on the subject - eg, are you trying to understand a concept? Or memorize a shit ton of content (say vocabulary). Different methods are needed.
jaddood 10y ago
I disagree almost completely with the article. From my experience, it is almost always an over complication of learning to study a lot at home and to take notes in a special way or whatever. What you should do, in my opinion, is to focus almost exclusively on the ideas explained and try in any way to oppose them, when you find something you feel shouldn't be how it is, ask. The mere exploration of the concepts gives deep understanding of them and will require you almost no extra work at home. Often it will literally need no extra work at all. Also, when the teacher answers your question, you will get even deeper insight and so will the teacher (especially when it comes to higher levels of teaching) and most other students who care to learn. Jotting down notes is a nice way to force yourself to formulate the ideas yourself, if you don't already do so, but most often, these notes needn't and shouldn't be read. They should just be written down.
- pthreads 10y ago
  >...focus almost exclusively on the ideas explained and try in any way to oppose them, when you find something you feel shouldn't be how it is, ask... Not picking on your comment, just wanted to share a little anecdote. We had this one retired guy in grad school who already had 2 Ph.D.s in other disciplines and this was probably his third. OMG he would incessantly ask questions in class. They were not even helpful questions -- very basic and mundane. In an algorithms class he asked the prof. how he came up with those numbers in an example even though he had already said that they were random. At which point the prof. rolled his eyes and said "magic!" His actions were very annoying and slowed down the class significantly by breaking the flow. When asked privately why he would do that his answer was he was helping out others who may be too afraid to ask basic questions. I felt like banging my head on a wall.
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    That was always a tension for me at university. Do I ask a question, because I'm stumped, this may be confusing others, and most people are too scared to do it? Or am I just holding up the class? No idea what people thought, or if I crossed the line. If they're too shy to ask questions they're probably too shy to reprimand me for it.
yellow_viper 10y ago
What's with all the comics? For anyone who's completed a CS degree, how much studying did you do per night. I understand working on projects etc can eat up hours but I don't really include that. Back at college just now and starting university in Sept. I had never studied in my life until college (coasted of natural ability all my life) and I'm finding it difficult to even spend 1hr a night. (Average mark currently is 80%) 5hrs per night seems insane to me. When studying I either understand the concept fully and fire through it rapid. Don't understand it and spend ages figuring it out/trying to find answers online. Or have no idea, can't find anything in the textbooks/online and resort to crying in the corner.
- Ologn 10y ago
  > how much time They usually say at least three hours study for each hour of class, I used that as my guide > difficult to even spend 1 hour a night The more abstract and mathematical the class, the longer I know it will last and I can use it. The more specific classes like learning C++ were immediately useful. That said, I did have to kick myself to memorize dozens of species of fungi and their attributes for my science requirement class. You never know what will come in useful. English writing class seems like BS? Not if it teaches you to write documentation, e-mails etc. better. > can't find anything I've been there too. It makes me skeptical of these people who say Coursera etc. will destroy colleges. I can always ask my professor after class or during office hours. You're going to be rooting around in your work life as well, so aside from the class material, you're exercising this skill as well.
  - yellow_viper 10y ago
    >They usually say at least three hours study for each hour of class, I used that as my guide That would put me at 18hrs of studying a day :/ Due to years of posting nonsense online, English is easy for me (top of the class). Not looking forward to my 2 science requirements though as thats where I struggle to concentrate.
    - lasfter 10y ago
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drenvuk 10y ago
I've found that the best way to learn something is to play with that thing. Doesn't matter if it's an essay, a sentence, a formula, a function, an algorithm, or whatever. The most essential thing is to play with it. Turn it around in your head, try to apply it to different circumstances - even ones where it would seem nonsensical. Everything is just a block or piece of knowledge in a certain shape waiting for you to see if you can fit it into some random kinda-round hole you found. I feel like people approach higher levels of education more like a job than like a game to master. It's all the same.
- dukeofdandelion 10y ago
  Nothing is good, unless you play with it-Funkadelic
- dhimes 10y ago
  I love the way you put this. Yes: the hurdle to get over is to get the information organized in your brain in a way that you can retrieve it. Playing with it is a great way to do that! Also: making concept maps, Venn diagrams, tables and so on.
waderyan 10y ago
I enjoyed this article and this subject. A small anecdote to share. I had a B average after my freshman year. During the break, I had dinner with a university professor. I asked him how I could improve my grades and he shared the following points of advice. 1. On the first day of class observe the students who ask intelligent questions and are engaged. Sit by and study with them. 2. Finish small assignments a day before the due date and large assignments a week before. This is a forcing function to 1) manage your time effectively (referenced repeatedly in the article) 2) befriend your TA's and professors. This advice helped me improve my grades and I felt a massive lift in my learning ability.
- sevensor 10y ago
  With regard to (1), absent any other signal, try to sit near the front of the lecture hall. You can bet the students who seek out the back rows are not the most engaged with the material.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    Also gives you bonus points with the professor, simply because they can't help notice that you did that and even subconsciously getting closer signals interest. My very first exam grade when I started studying CS (25 years ago) was an "A" with a very strict professor who rarely gave anything better than a "B" on a theory-heavy (algorithms) subject - who could have known nothing at all about me, only that I seemed to actually be interested in what he had to say because I always sat in the front. I don't think the oral exam itself was responsible, because there were few hard questions, it was more a back and forth talk about things not even the core subject of the lectures. I think he would have asked more actual questions to people he thought he knew less about. So I think I already entered the exam with a significant bonus.
otterpro 10y ago
The article was brief and had some good advice, and it sets the issue straight of having priority of school over other activities. School is a full-time job and spending 40 hours/week should be expected. A lot of the advice are also just common sense. I also strongly recommend Cal Newport's book "How to Become a Straight-A Student" (https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Straight-Student-Unconventional/dp/0767922719/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Straight-Student-Unconvent...). I've read a lot of books on studying in college, but I think this one really is one of the best way to study.
JusticeJuice 10y ago
Good article, but I think it's important to change study tactics depending on the topic - and your own personality. Eg - when I was studying maths and physics, I found the best thing was to not take notes in class, but spend all my time trying to fully comprehend the concept. When I was studying french, flash cards and memorisation schedules were key to the hardest part of it - vocab. I'm sure there is a better way to do this however, I am dyslexic, but I still only scraped through even though I put in the most effort. When working on project based assignments (such as design), I found the best way was to ensure I was fully excited about my idea - that would power me through. And test early. Basically - match the method to the subject, and yourself.
- foobarian 10y ago
  When taking advanced math classes/seminars--spend the time listening and following, unless you're the designated notetaker in which case you do your darned best to take the best notes possible, and type them up in the finest Latex fashion.
- dhimes 10y ago
  Indeed! Hence studyswami.com
projektir 10y ago
Ideas on "how to study" in the context of an educational environment fail on the outset because that environment is often the greatest influence that you really can't control. Studying ability often becomes a factor of prior exposure, time availability, fluid intelligence, mental stability, and a bunch of other random factors that all need to align reasonably well. For a small fraction of the population, these things will align. For any given person, they're not going to align all that well. For some people, they're not going to align well at all, and they may not make it. What ends up happening is that the person can't truly properly keep up, so they end up surviving instead. And they may succeed in doing just that, but learning will be damaged. Most studying techniques fall short because they do not properly account for this survival mode and are not really the techniques that help someone, well, survive. Proper learning is not rushed and hyper competitive, but what the average student encounters is. Taking very dense notes, for instance, can easily backfire if it takes too much time and if it's not truly needed. Knowing what to learn, how to learn it, what not to learn, etc., are all separate skills, and not everyone has them. And it's not something that can easily be summarized because it's more of a skill than a piece of knowledge, and most of it comes down to your personal strengths as well as weaknesses. There are plenty of successful students who have broken all of these rules and I'm sure we all know a few.
- dhimes 10y ago
  Despite the fact that you can't control the environment there are definitely things you can do to deal with that environment. The environment isn't random; in fact, it's been honed for quite some time. You are quite correct that students have individual styles- strengths and weaknesses. What works for me won't work for you and vice versa. Moreover, what works for me with math won't work for me with psychology. But there are things that are more valuable to do than other things simply because of the way brains work. Rewriting notes, for example, is a waste of time. Re-organizing notes, however, is priceless. This is one professor doing his best to help, and I appreciate that. But there is better information out there.
  - projektir 10y ago
    > Despite the fact that you can't control the environment there are definitely things you can do to deal with that environment. That's not really how things like this work. Competitive, live-or-die environments will always have a group that will not be able to survive those environments. It's in the definition. If you create an environment which requires a near-perfect alignment of factors, there will be many people who do not have that alignment and those people will be at risk. > You are quite correct that students have individual styles- strengths and weaknesses. And some people have more weaknesses than strengths. For those people to survive, they need to have access to something other people do not, which is unlikely. Professors should stop trying to help, and should instead ask struggling students, as well as students who used to be struggling but stopped, and vice versa. But I've never really seen anyone listen to a struggling student, they're usually just labeled lazy and ignored. Advice on studying coming from people who likely had very little issues with it due to the good alignment of factors is near-useless to people who do not have such an alignment. It's much easier to do your homework every time when you can quickly understand the material due to prior exposure or good fluid intelligence. It's a different story when it takes you 5 hours to solve problem #1 and there are 10 total. Something's gotta give. Advice on how to study better is not needed. Studying better requires time, a nurturing environment, time, good pedagogy and/or structure, and time. It is known, it's just not done, because it's not the priority. There are techniques, yes, and different approaches, but they themselves require time to figure out, and time can smooth over such problems. When you take away time from people, you must admit the goal is less about teaching people something and more about trying to figure out who to toss aside. And you will notice also that in such an environment, the students can get better at studying all they want, and the filter will just get more stringent and narrow. The problem is the environment. If you ignore the environment, all you will see is better and better coping strategies combined with a mysterious lack of improvement of the overall situation. And this is coming from someone who had it pretty all right compared to some people I knew.
red_admiral 10y ago
The opening sounds to me a bit like "if you have to take a job in order to afford to be here, then you don't deserve to be here". I doubt that's intentional but it's not very well written - it sounds like accusing poor students that their main problem is not needing to be able to afford food and rent but "not prioritising their education enough". > If you must work (in order to make ends meet), you should realize the limitations that this imposes on your study time. What exactly is such a student supposed to do with this observation, other than conclude "education is not for people like me"?
- kerbalspacepro 9y ago
  Get loans? If you cannot justify the loans for a college education, you can't justify the college education.
journeeman 10y ago
Great cartoons! :D
almostarockstar 10y ago
>...25 hours that you should be spending studying at home (or in the library) >Dividing that 25 hours by those 5 days gives you 5 hours of studying per night Haha. Final year PhD checking in. I've never, not in my entire life, never, done any more than 2 hours study (outside of classes, lectures or labs) on a single night. My brain would just stop focusing after a couple hours. Plus, why would you need to study if you focus during classes and actively try to understand what's going on?
madsbuch 10y ago
The best advice in this article is IMHO in the bottom: > Well, of course, you don't have to do all of it at once. Try various of these suggestions to see what works for you. For me to learn, I heavily need to motivation. Hence I usually spend a couple of days pondering before doing anything productive.
morbidhawk 10y ago
What if learning "how to study" is just a way to distract yourself from learning the material? Finding a learning process might sound more fun and creative, but more than likely it will be a big waste of time. Fortunately, what you'll be learning from your study work is more likely to be useful and more fact-based than learning how to study, which is primarily opinion-based. If I was to create a study guide I wouldn't tell the student anything they should be doing, but rather ask questions that lead them back to their source material: * What are you learning about currently? * Why do you find it challenging? * Why is it important? * What is the general idea? Learning by applying some memorization technique sounds boring to me, in comparison to curiosity-based learning using socratic/thoughtful questioning. Instead of responding to study work with a fight-or-flight response, asking questions allow you to break out of that fearful mindset and start to examine the topic and as you ask questions about it you'll start to find little bits of interesting knowledge in it.

How to Study (2016)

314 points by colobas 10y ago

This is a fascinating subject that I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about, as I've continually tried to improve my studying habits in these first two years of medical school. There's some great points here. One for discussion that I'd disagree with is copying your notes. Here in medical school, it's literally temporally impossible to copy your notes and actually get to all the material. It's definitely an extremely effective way to learn the material, but unfortunately when you have so much material in so little time, it's just not feasible (FWIW, an average semester has 25 credits of courses for me). I'd also add in spaced repetition studying - this has been an extremely effective method of studying for me, and I've learned more via spaced repetition studying of previously made flashcards than I have from reading the textbooks. And it does a phenomenal job of isolating the material you need to know from what you already know.

kendallpark 10y ago
> Here in medical school, it's literally temporally impossible to copy your notes and actually get to all the material. I second this. My med school strat is as follows: I write questions in Workflowy during lecture based on what I think could be tested from the lecture. Then I import them into a SRS app I built and drill them all the week before exams. Works pretty well.
- pragone 10y ago
  I don't have lectures, so I have the tedious job of trying to pick out the relevant material straight from the textbooks. Let's just say Bro's cards (https://github.com/enlightenedchampagne/Brosencephalon https://github.com/enlightenedchampagne/Brosencephalon) is a real lifesaver. (Unfortunately my school tends to test some not-board-relevant material and also not test board-specific material, so it's hit and miss, but I've been doing alright so far.)
dhimes 10y ago
Email me (in my profile). I have something I'd like for you to look at.
Noseshine 10y ago
After a CS degree (2 decades ago) and many hundreds of hours and courses on medical topics over the last few years, I think studying medicine and fields like engineering or math are very different though, and what works in one may not be the best idea for the other. A lot of memorizing in medicine, like neural pathways, (bio)chemical pathways, location of nuclei in the brain, anatomy (of course), regulatory circuits. You learn everything to "debug" one concrete instance of a biological being, and although variations exist in comparison to all that could be (or even what there is, looking at all animals) it's very little, and it doesn't change (beyond the inherent variation, which only seems great because you are looking at only humans so any deviations appear greater than they are without the perspective of "all possible biological systems" for comparison). Engineers learn existing systems - and many kinds of them - to be able to create new ones. Medical doctors instead work on only one already existing systems. Engineers can experiment and fail, many times. Medical doctors should "do no harm" first of all. So that limits the creativity and determines how you learn from the outset. Therefore which methods work will also be different.
- pragone 9y ago
  Having studied both at this point, I'd agree. I think most of my learning in CS tends to be experimentation - write some programs, see why they don't work. Sure, there's some things you need to memorize and understand, but that knowledge is strongly reinforced through experimentation.
pitt1980 10y ago
out of curiosity " previously made flashcards " are you taking the time to make them yourself, or are you using source that made them for you?
- pragone 9y ago
  I'm using previously made cards by another individual. A reddit user named brosencephalon when through First Aid* (2015 I think?) and made about 13000 Anki cards for everything in it. It's been extremely popular on the r/medicalschool subreddit, with multiple people saying they did well on boards as a result. -- * First Aid: First Aid for the USMLE, published every year. It's basically the bible for medical students preparing for the board exams (namely, the USMLE, or US Medical Licensing Exam, of which there are 3 parts. The first one is taken at the end of the 2nd year of medical school.)

nxc18 10y ago

This has a lot of great stuff, but I hereby dispute the 'don't take notes on a computer' claims. It is certainly true that typing out notes is generally a bad idea. I have and can take notes on a computer while basically unconscious and getting no benefit from them; transcription is easier than and a distinct activity from taking notes. However, with pen computing, the computer becomes a very useful note taking tool. I can write out my notes in OneNote while recording the lecture. If I miss something or want clarification, I can go back and listen to the lecture, linked up by time with the notes I took. I can go back and search my notes - they are useful for quickly reviewing a topic I may have studied in the past. I like color coding my notes. I can write in any color, recolor after the fact if I want a different structure, and generally add multiple channels of cues for my studying. Digital ink & paper have potential to replace physical notes without the negatives of typing.

dkarl 10y ago
I certainly hope this happens. It has always been frustrating to me that with note-taking I have to choose one or the other. I can take handwritten notes to help me remember, or I can type notes for later reading and searching. There are aspects to each that I regret losing when I choose the other.
- nobodyorother 10y ago
  If you have the time, choose both: write them out and then review and revise them as you write them up.

Kenji 10y ago

I didn't see it mentioned anywhere on this page, but for memorizing, there is one very important insight. How well you remember something directly correlates with how interesting and important you find it. As if your brain is a cache that evicts data based on this priority. If you manage to manipulate yourself into believing that the study material is very important, you can memorize incredible amounts of data. Well, the optimal case would be if it's actually important stuff, of course! If you start thinking "why does this even matter", the memories instantly start to decompose. Also, at uni, I learned that taking notes in maths classes is a recipe for disaster. How come? The mere act of writing down and arranging formulas on my sheet takes enough thinking power that I can no longer follow the lecture. What's better, having one single good shot at understanding things, or having not understood things and the incomprehensible scribbling of your notes also makes zero sense without the professor's explanation? The former for me. As long as I know the broad subject names, I can read up on my own.

linkregister 10y ago
One way to attend math lectures is to have already read the chapter in the textbook and attempted to understand it. That way, the lecture addresses the gaps in your knowledge and you can ask questions. This time-intensive strategy might be suboptimal in the long run if it reduces the time available for doing homework / sample problems, which is almost certainly the most effective way to actually learn the material.
ashark 10y ago
I had an otherwise excellent (if infamously uptight) calculus teacher in high school whose one mistake more than undid everything she did right: she insisted that everyone take extensive notes. She also moved quickly though materials and examples, making the problem worse. It ruined the class.

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janwillemb 10y ago

I wish someone would have taught me how to study at school or in university. I somehow managed, but I'm still intimidated and slightly panicking whenever I have to learn/memorize something: I simply don't know how.

anon_temp_2404 10y ago
Memorizing is a learnable skill, like anything else. There are lots of tricks you can use that eventually become second nature. A good starting point might be the book "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer. If you want to remember names easily check out Harry Lorayne. There's a YouTube video titled "Harry Lorayne memorizes audience's names" where he demonstrates his abilities. I started using his method recently and found it works well. But as with anything else you have to explore and figure out which methods work best for you. Good luck.
JusticeJuice 10y ago
Memorization depends on the subject - eg, are you trying to understand a concept? Or memorize a shit ton of content (say vocabulary). Different methods are needed.

jaddood 10y ago

I disagree almost completely with the article. From my experience, it is almost always an over complication of learning to study a lot at home and to take notes in a special way or whatever. What you should do, in my opinion, is to focus almost exclusively on the ideas explained and try in any way to oppose them, when you find something you feel shouldn't be how it is, ask. The mere exploration of the concepts gives deep understanding of them and will require you almost no extra work at home. Often it will literally need no extra work at all. Also, when the teacher answers your question, you will get even deeper insight and so will the teacher (especially when it comes to higher levels of teaching) and most other students who care to learn. Jotting down notes is a nice way to force yourself to formulate the ideas yourself, if you don't already do so, but most often, these notes needn't and shouldn't be read. They should just be written down.

pthreads 10y ago
>...focus almost exclusively on the ideas explained and try in any way to oppose them, when you find something you feel shouldn't be how it is, ask... Not picking on your comment, just wanted to share a little anecdote. We had this one retired guy in grad school who already had 2 Ph.D.s in other disciplines and this was probably his third. OMG he would incessantly ask questions in class. They were not even helpful questions -- very basic and mundane. In an algorithms class he asked the prof. how he came up with those numbers in an example even though he had already said that they were random. At which point the prof. rolled his eyes and said "magic!" His actions were very annoying and slowed down the class significantly by breaking the flow. When asked privately why he would do that his answer was he was helping out others who may be too afraid to ask basic questions. I felt like banging my head on a wall.
- lacampbell 10y ago
  That was always a tension for me at university. Do I ask a question, because I'm stumped, this may be confusing others, and most people are too scared to do it? Or am I just holding up the class? No idea what people thought, or if I crossed the line. If they're too shy to ask questions they're probably too shy to reprimand me for it.

yellow_viper 10y ago

What's with all the comics? For anyone who's completed a CS degree, how much studying did you do per night. I understand working on projects etc can eat up hours but I don't really include that. Back at college just now and starting university in Sept. I had never studied in my life until college (coasted of natural ability all my life) and I'm finding it difficult to even spend 1hr a night. (Average mark currently is 80%) 5hrs per night seems insane to me. When studying I either understand the concept fully and fire through it rapid. Don't understand it and spend ages figuring it out/trying to find answers online. Or have no idea, can't find anything in the textbooks/online and resort to crying in the corner.

Ologn 10y ago
> how much time They usually say at least three hours study for each hour of class, I used that as my guide > difficult to even spend 1 hour a night The more abstract and mathematical the class, the longer I know it will last and I can use it. The more specific classes like learning C++ were immediately useful. That said, I did have to kick myself to memorize dozens of species of fungi and their attributes for my science requirement class. You never know what will come in useful. English writing class seems like BS? Not if it teaches you to write documentation, e-mails etc. better. > can't find anything I've been there too. It makes me skeptical of these people who say Coursera etc. will destroy colleges. I can always ask my professor after class or during office hours. You're going to be rooting around in your work life as well, so aside from the class material, you're exercising this skill as well.
- yellow_viper 10y ago
  >They usually say at least three hours study for each hour of class, I used that as my guide That would put me at 18hrs of studying a day :/ Due to years of posting nonsense online, English is easy for me (top of the class). Not looking forward to my 2 science requirements though as thats where I struggle to concentrate.
  - lasfter 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

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drenvuk 10y ago

I've found that the best way to learn something is to play with that thing. Doesn't matter if it's an essay, a sentence, a formula, a function, an algorithm, or whatever. The most essential thing is to play with it. Turn it around in your head, try to apply it to different circumstances - even ones where it would seem nonsensical. Everything is just a block or piece of knowledge in a certain shape waiting for you to see if you can fit it into some random kinda-round hole you found. I feel like people approach higher levels of education more like a job than like a game to master. It's all the same.

dukeofdandelion 10y ago
Nothing is good, unless you play with it-Funkadelic
dhimes 10y ago
I love the way you put this. Yes: the hurdle to get over is to get the information organized in your brain in a way that you can retrieve it. Playing with it is a great way to do that! Also: making concept maps, Venn diagrams, tables and so on.

waderyan 10y ago

I enjoyed this article and this subject. A small anecdote to share. I had a B average after my freshman year. During the break, I had dinner with a university professor. I asked him how I could improve my grades and he shared the following points of advice. 1. On the first day of class observe the students who ask intelligent questions and are engaged. Sit by and study with them. 2. Finish small assignments a day before the due date and large assignments a week before. This is a forcing function to 1) manage your time effectively (referenced repeatedly in the article) 2) befriend your TA's and professors. This advice helped me improve my grades and I felt a massive lift in my learning ability.

sevensor 10y ago
With regard to (1), absent any other signal, try to sit near the front of the lecture hall. You can bet the students who seek out the back rows are not the most engaged with the material.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Also gives you bonus points with the professor, simply because they can't help notice that you did that and even subconsciously getting closer signals interest. My very first exam grade when I started studying CS (25 years ago) was an "A" with a very strict professor who rarely gave anything better than a "B" on a theory-heavy (algorithms) subject - who could have known nothing at all about me, only that I seemed to actually be interested in what he had to say because I always sat in the front. I don't think the oral exam itself was responsible, because there were few hard questions, it was more a back and forth talk about things not even the core subject of the lectures. I think he would have asked more actual questions to people he thought he knew less about. So I think I already entered the exam with a significant bonus.

otterpro 10y ago

The article was brief and had some good advice, and it sets the issue straight of having priority of school over other activities. School is a full-time job and spending 40 hours/week should be expected. A lot of the advice are also just common sense. I also strongly recommend Cal Newport's book "How to Become a Straight-A Student" (https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Straight-Student-Unconventional/dp/0767922719/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Straight-Student-Unconvent...). I've read a lot of books on studying in college, but I think this one really is one of the best way to study.

JusticeJuice 10y ago

Good article, but I think it's important to change study tactics depending on the topic - and your own personality. Eg - when I was studying maths and physics, I found the best thing was to not take notes in class, but spend all my time trying to fully comprehend the concept. When I was studying french, flash cards and memorisation schedules were key to the hardest part of it - vocab. I'm sure there is a better way to do this however, I am dyslexic, but I still only scraped through even though I put in the most effort. When working on project based assignments (such as design), I found the best way was to ensure I was fully excited about my idea - that would power me through. And test early. Basically - match the method to the subject, and yourself.

foobarian 10y ago
When taking advanced math classes/seminars--spend the time listening and following, unless you're the designated notetaker in which case you do your darned best to take the best notes possible, and type them up in the finest Latex fashion.
dhimes 10y ago
Indeed! Hence studyswami.com

projektir 10y ago

Ideas on "how to study" in the context of an educational environment fail on the outset because that environment is often the greatest influence that you really can't control. Studying ability often becomes a factor of prior exposure, time availability, fluid intelligence, mental stability, and a bunch of other random factors that all need to align reasonably well. For a small fraction of the population, these things will align. For any given person, they're not going to align all that well. For some people, they're not going to align well at all, and they may not make it. What ends up happening is that the person can't truly properly keep up, so they end up surviving instead. And they may succeed in doing just that, but learning will be damaged. Most studying techniques fall short because they do not properly account for this survival mode and are not really the techniques that help someone, well, survive. Proper learning is not rushed and hyper competitive, but what the average student encounters is. Taking very dense notes, for instance, can easily backfire if it takes too much time and if it's not truly needed. Knowing what to learn, how to learn it, what not to learn, etc., are all separate skills, and not everyone has them. And it's not something that can easily be summarized because it's more of a skill than a piece of knowledge, and most of it comes down to your personal strengths as well as weaknesses. There are plenty of successful students who have broken all of these rules and I'm sure we all know a few.

dhimes 10y ago
Despite the fact that you can't control the environment there are definitely things you can do to deal with that environment. The environment isn't random; in fact, it's been honed for quite some time. You are quite correct that students have individual styles- strengths and weaknesses. What works for me won't work for you and vice versa. Moreover, what works for me with math won't work for me with psychology. But there are things that are more valuable to do than other things simply because of the way brains work. Rewriting notes, for example, is a waste of time. Re-organizing notes, however, is priceless. This is one professor doing his best to help, and I appreciate that. But there is better information out there.
- projektir 10y ago
  > Despite the fact that you can't control the environment there are definitely things you can do to deal with that environment. That's not really how things like this work. Competitive, live-or-die environments will always have a group that will not be able to survive those environments. It's in the definition. If you create an environment which requires a near-perfect alignment of factors, there will be many people who do not have that alignment and those people will be at risk. > You are quite correct that students have individual styles- strengths and weaknesses. And some people have more weaknesses than strengths. For those people to survive, they need to have access to something other people do not, which is unlikely. Professors should stop trying to help, and should instead ask struggling students, as well as students who used to be struggling but stopped, and vice versa. But I've never really seen anyone listen to a struggling student, they're usually just labeled lazy and ignored. Advice on studying coming from people who likely had very little issues with it due to the good alignment of factors is near-useless to people who do not have such an alignment. It's much easier to do your homework every time when you can quickly understand the material due to prior exposure or good fluid intelligence. It's a different story when it takes you 5 hours to solve problem #1 and there are 10 total. Something's gotta give. Advice on how to study better is not needed. Studying better requires time, a nurturing environment, time, good pedagogy and/or structure, and time. It is known, it's just not done, because it's not the priority. There are techniques, yes, and different approaches, but they themselves require time to figure out, and time can smooth over such problems. When you take away time from people, you must admit the goal is less about teaching people something and more about trying to figure out who to toss aside. And you will notice also that in such an environment, the students can get better at studying all they want, and the filter will just get more stringent and narrow. The problem is the environment. If you ignore the environment, all you will see is better and better coping strategies combined with a mysterious lack of improvement of the overall situation. And this is coming from someone who had it pretty all right compared to some people I knew.

red_admiral 10y ago

The opening sounds to me a bit like "if you have to take a job in order to afford to be here, then you don't deserve to be here". I doubt that's intentional but it's not very well written - it sounds like accusing poor students that their main problem is not needing to be able to afford food and rent but "not prioritising their education enough". > If you must work (in order to make ends meet), you should realize the limitations that this imposes on your study time. What exactly is such a student supposed to do with this observation, other than conclude "education is not for people like me"?

kerbalspacepro 9y ago
Get loans? If you cannot justify the loans for a college education, you can't justify the college education.

journeeman 10y ago

Great cartoons! :D

almostarockstar 10y ago

>...25 hours that you should be spending studying at home (or in the library) >Dividing that 25 hours by those 5 days gives you 5 hours of studying per night Haha. Final year PhD checking in. I've never, not in my entire life, never, done any more than 2 hours study (outside of classes, lectures or labs) on a single night. My brain would just stop focusing after a couple hours. Plus, why would you need to study if you focus during classes and actively try to understand what's going on?

madsbuch 10y ago

The best advice in this article is IMHO in the bottom: > Well, of course, you don't have to do all of it at once. Try various of these suggestions to see what works for you. For me to learn, I heavily need to motivation. Hence I usually spend a couple of days pondering before doing anything productive.

morbidhawk 10y ago

What if learning "how to study" is just a way to distract yourself from learning the material? Finding a learning process might sound more fun and creative, but more than likely it will be a big waste of time. Fortunately, what you'll be learning from your study work is more likely to be useful and more fact-based than learning how to study, which is primarily opinion-based. If I was to create a study guide I wouldn't tell the student anything they should be doing, but rather ask questions that lead them back to their source material: * What are you learning about currently? * Why do you find it challenging? * Why is it important? * What is the general idea? Learning by applying some memorization technique sounds boring to me, in comparison to curiosity-based learning using socratic/thoughtful questioning. Instead of responding to study work with a fight-or-flight response, asking questions allow you to break out of that fearful mindset and start to examine the topic and as you ask questions about it you'll start to find little bits of interesting knowledge in it.