"Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion." -Muhammad Ali
Studying is an inevitable bane in school we all have to do before comes that one prize, which doesn't seem to be worth bleeding all night for. Or so it appears, given you have been doing it wrong. There is a saying that's thrown around once in a while in this highly-industrious modern age. "Work smart, not hard." But what does that really mean? Does it imply we don't have to work hard?
Some people have no clue how to even kick-start this kind of work ethic. "How do I 'work smart' if I'm dumb in the first place?" But the truth is, we're not as dumb we think. Just inexperienced. Getting rid of the "hard" part is a bit tricky because to make work easier, we first have to work hard, ironically enough. Not on getting more notes and having to cover your entire dorm room with card stocks, mind you, but on getting smarter about learning per se. The more you exercise with your thought process, the closer you get to never having to carry as heavy a psychological weight again.
PASSIVE REVIEW
A common studying method the archetypal student uses is called "passive review". You and I can relate to this; it's when we passively skim through the pages, highlighting and soaring by terms and meanings without firm application. The topic may be understood now, but only after two days or so do we realize our unstable mind shack has been slowly spitting out the context of its own free will.
We have entirely forgotten everything we thought we'd learned, regardless of how intense we reviewed for them and how many multiple-choice questionnaires we made last night. In Karpicke and Roediger's study, passive review is proven to be ineffective.
Very much unlike its opposite:
ACTIVE RECALL
Trying to remember altogether the spelling, written definition, or even font type of a new word, is a terrible attempt to strengthen vocabulary. Retention won't last for long that way, as opposed to actively recalling said word by applying it in real-life conversation. What is this word's etymology? When would I use this word? Would said word depend on what kind of subject is broached?
There are three effective methods that will help you on how to use active recall.
1. SQ3R Method
The "S" stands for Survey. Survey is more or less passive review, but only as a means to formulate expectations of what a topic might hold. When we're talking about the scientific method, Survey is the "identifying of a problem".
You want to create questions about the topic while you're at it. This is what the "Q" stands for, the part where we have to break tradition. I say this because, usually, we study topics while putting future questions on hold, instead of making them before or while actively engaging in the material.
That is where the first R of 3 comes in. Read. Read in order to attempt to find answers to your questions at hand.
The second R stands for Retrieve. The active recall part. Practical application, writing prompts, and even mnemonics are effective exercising equipment in order to strengthen your memory.
The final R is Review. Not passively, of course, but repeating the method as to how you came to learn the information. Summarizing such information is a means of assurance. Practice makes perfect.
2. Feynman Technique
Teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime, right?
Two requirements are needed in order to perform the Feynman Technique: the teacher, the student, and the material. If you counted three, you're wrong, because you are actually the teacher as well as the student. Though it doesn't necessarily have to be a me-myself-and-I lecture; you can talk to your wall, your dog, anything or anyone you can think of.
The focal point here is the manner in how you are teaching the given material to yourself. In other words, how you conduct "autodidacticism" which is basically education without the guidance of masters or institutions. The only drawback in this technique is the risk of looking silly, but emulating a learned professor teaching an imaginary class proves to be one of the most effective ways of studying ever.
The Feynman Technique especially works since you appear to be an expert yourself breaking down a problem. Another way of looking at this is when you try to explain something to a child, as a means of simplifying the complexity of the problem as much as you can, until the child in his intellectual level can understand it. Conduct this on yourself for every unexplored knowledge and you'll be surprised how smart you actually are.
3. Flashcards
A classic way of retrieval practice, flashcards are commonly used among school topnotchers. We are not to confuse them with multiple-choice questionnaires. Reading the available choices upfront only encourages recognition, not raw genuine mental effort. The correct way to make a flashcard is to write the answer at the back of the question. Notice how your valedictorian doesn't flip the card until she is done explaining the theme of the given question herself. She then feels very rewarded when her explanation does indeed align with the answer.
One would think, that whether it's active recall or passive review that is double-edged. At least with passive review, studying is a lot easier to do, right? But what makes studying easier is not about making studying easier. It's about our attempts to make the examination room eventually look like a cake shop. For each and every improving examination score rewards your brain with a positive feedback loop, thereby amplifying the belief that you're smarter than you think, thereby literally making you smarter, thereby making your studying process seem a lot easier than before.
Satisfaction can be mistaken for sufficiency. Finishing a 30-page handout within the afternoon, for instance, may feel satisfying because you can finally reward yourself with a short stop in the mall before you move on to the second subject. But it doesn't suffice to say that merely understanding a concept gives you the queue to move on to the next right away. We have to understand how to immortalize these concepts as well, to become part of who we are, and that, I believe, is a reward in itself.
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