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> As an undergraduate student, I found that writing a summary of everything I had learned in a class was one of the best ways to study for an exam. I would just
by ivan_ah 12y ago
> As an undergraduate student, I found that writing a summary of everything I had learned in a class was one of the best ways to study for an exam. I would just sit down with a blank piece of paper and try to summarize everything as precisely as possible. Ultimately, writing your own textbook would be a very effective way to learn the material.
Amen.
Back when I was tutoring a lot, I used to ask the students to keep a "master formula sheet" and continuously add formulas to it. In the final review session, I asked them to explain each math formula in plain English, e.g F=ma --> forces cause acceleration (and the acceleration produced by a force is inversely proportional to the mass of the object). I could immediately tell who understood the material and who was trying to get by on memorization.
Another useful exercise is to pretend you forgot your "formula sheet" and try to reproduce it from scratch. If you can't it means you're not solving enough problems---after solving 5-10 problems using a given formula, you start to remember it, and not as a string, but as an idea. You can forget a string; you can't forget an idea.
- matwood 12y agoI used a similar technique. In undergrad and grad school my studying consisted of typing up the notes from class and summarizing the book chapters. I was always amused when people would ask me for the notes without realizing that the act of creating them was the study part. I rarely looked at them after the fact.
- halfcat 12y agoThat's right. You train to recall, by recalling. This was a big revelation for me when I studied mnemonics. Information can flow in two directions: into your brain, and out from your brain. It is the act of repeatedly retrieving the info from your brain that strengthens your memory of that info, not the repeated input of that info into the brain.
- jimmaswell 12y agoI seem to mostly remember them as strings orthogonally to the idea. One particular example was "x equals negative b plus or minus square root b squared minus four a c all over two a" set to "pop goes the weasel" in high school. After knowing that for a while I came across a visual diagram of what the quadratic formula and completing the square actually mean and it wasn't until then that I understood them. Some formula formats I recognize more by shape/appearance such as the g = G m1m2 / r^2 form that applies to some contactless forces.
- roflmyeggo 12y ago"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -Albert Einstein
- unangst 12y agoTaking good notes on paper is lost art. In college, I returned a textbook before I opened the shrink wrap when I realized the student next to me was highlighting verbatim from the textbook what the professor was talking about. Writing everything down saved me >$100 and earned me an easy A.
- ojbyrne 12y agoI was briefly a college professor. The thing I took away from the experience was - if you really want to learn something as well as possible, teach it to a class of 60.
- bsusensjackson 12y agoThose who teach learn much, those who are taught learn nothing.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]