7 ways to study that are proven to be effective from a scientific point of view③

Last time, I introduced two studying techniques: interval practice and alternative practice. Interval practice is to find out when to recap what you learned. Alternative practice is to work out questions in a random way without tackling with only one question. This contributes to enhance both ability to classify and ability to discover certain rule and principle. Then, let me keep showing the rest techniques.

Summarizing is to write down what you learned in your own words. When reading long sentences, it is not recommended to copy sentences as summarizing though schools and private schools usually instruct students to write down notes with a little space. Considering what you learned through reading in your own words and writing a bit extra note in your own words will bring you beneficial effects, such as easier to remind. Apart from that topic, school teachers usually make students copy on their notebooks what they write on the blackboard. What is worse, some teachers make students turn in their notebook in order to make sure whether they accurately take their notes completely the same as what teachers write on the blackboard. This is totally ridiculous. Those teachers are a kind of bad teachers who have negative influence on students. Teachers should hand out material including topic that they are going to discuss to students in advance because it is a hard task for students to understand what teachers are saying while taking notes.

Reflection, simply speaking, is to look back on today’s your studying; what did you learn, how long did you focus on studying, is there any point that should be improved in your studying? Reflection plays a great role for raising your motivation toward studying. In a club activity, you always thinking about how to improve your performance through try and error. Studying is the same principle as sport, which means that you have to keep finding out how to make a improvement in your studying. 

Massed learning is to go over the content you learn as soon as finishing that content. For example, before taking an exam, you might read textbook and solve questions in textbooks over and over again, which is massed learning. Distributed learning is to make a time interval when learning over what you learn. To put it simply, you recap the content after three days, which is an example of distributed learning. To alternate between these two methods of studying most effectively, you have to do massed learning when you need to fully understand what you learn. On the other hand, you should do distributed learning when you want to transmit what you learn into long-term memory. Keep in mind that the most effective learning is that after fully understanding what you learn by utilizing massed learning, you move on taking working memory to long-term memory through distributed learning. 

⑦Input practice and Output practice 

Input practice is to obtain knowledge from reading a book and listening to news. Output learning is to extract what you learned by writing out and figuring out questions and talking to someone. Recommended way to study is to take turn in studying input practice and output practice. For example, you’d better not do in a series of input practice or output practice, such as input practice →input practice →input practice. Alternatively studying facilities you to keep studying without losing concentration. Here is a good tip. You should avoid listening to music and studying at a noisy place when doing input practice because additional information makes it harder for you to fully understand the content. On the other hand, you should study at a bit noisy place like cafeteria when doing output practice because additional information makes it easier for you to come up with new ideas.