Effective learning: looking for the best academic skills and techniques

The most effective techniques revolve around the following: 1. Repetition is the mother of memory. Repeat repeat repeat. We don't do this enough. We somehow always think that if we do something several times and understand, then we know how to do it. In most countries, repetition is a highly ingrained process and their test scores show it. More importantly by doing things again and agian, you build stamina and will power. 2. If you're doing a theoretical heavy subject, always ask yourself questions from the perspective of someone who doesn't know much about your topic. If you're studying some aspect of theology or literary theory or poltical science, imagine a person who is ignorant of it trying to attack your ideas. How would you defend yourself? Do you understand your topic enough to maintain a dialogue with someone who was intellectually opposing your contentions. Example: I had a very religious gym teacher in middle school. He was an intellectual and had great counterarguments to supposed atheists. I have always had his arguments in the back of my mind when reading writers hostile to religion. Although his criticisms weren't always spot on, his down-to-earthedness, a hard worn pragmatism, was somethign I carried with me and I tested out all ideas I learned by imagining him trying to attack it. Could I defend myself? Were my answers fair, logical, coherent, and most importantly effective? 3. Counterfactuals. Use them. In econ class, you often learn about comparative advantage. Simple idea. But it's actually not. Ask yourself "under what conditions, realistic or not, would comparative advantage not occur." When learning linguistics and the idea of recursion in languages, ask yourself, what would a language look like without recursion? What features or properties would we expect to see in a language that didn't have this postulated universal characteristic. Last one, again from economics: Why does the idea of marginal utility NOT contradict the concept of returns to scale (up to a point of course). 4. Think backwards. Look at the conclusion your author makes and ask yourself the following question: What ideas, operations, dynamics did the author have to take into account--to notice--for him to come his conclusion? You are teaching yourself to think differently, which is what we mean when say rigor. When you come across something especially insightful in your reading, ask yourself "What should I have noticed from the beginning so that I could have come up with that insight myself. example: In a statement, Nietzsche noted that the problem with Hamelt wasn't that he thought too much but that he thought too well. That is insight. How should I have been thinking and approaching the text to get that kind of insight out of it myself. 5. Repetition. (see number 1) 6. The biggest myth in American pedagogy, and it is one that comes from our consumer-oriented approach to education, is that a necessary condition for effective instruction is that it be fun, pleasant, enjoyable. That is a myth. Not all effective learning techniques are pleasant. In fact, many are not. If it doesn't feel natural at first, it might still be good for you. I always balked at the idea of doing drills, math drills, and hated them. Yet not a single person I know who is comfortable with numbers got that way without the necessary and intiially unpleasant repetition of these drills. After a while it's no different than exercise. What used to be hard becomes either enjoyable or completely neutral. 7. Read. Read. Read. Knowledge is like compound interests. The more you learn, the more you slog through, the more resiliency you bring into your next endeavor. Seek to apply multidisciplinary insights from other fields into whatever you're studying. Don't be like the man with the hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Many of the specialities and disciplines overlap. Their insights can carry weight across conceptual dimensions. You can do it. It requires effort and diligence but you can master it. After a while, it becomes a habit. 8. There is a famous technique that was partially devised by NOam Chomsky's wife Carol Schatz Chomsky. It's often used with students who are slow or poor readers. They are told to read a task to themselves either out loud or to themselves along to a video cassette of that tape being read. Something about this technique helps to inculcate reading and decoding in students. Why is it not more readily known? It's cheap and most people who propose new learning techniques or offer up "added value insight" just wanna make money. The technique Schatz devised is still pretty cheap and hard to make tons of cash money off of. 9. I have never found studying in groups to be effective. There is a natural desire to want to interact more than learn. I might be wrong in this and it's not for everyone but a quiet study place is generally all you need. I remember cuddling up in the Regenstein Library in Hyde Park doing problem sets in calculus and taking law school classes. I don't think I would have gotten much added value from doing it with other students. 10. Beware of fads trends and anything that reeks of marketing. Learning along with sex is something we're all pretty good at. The insights are pretty old, time immemorial at least. You, in the words of Dr. Spock, know more than you think you do. Take the plunge.

The one thing I tell everyone who asks is to do all of the reading for every course in the first two weeks. Buckle down and power through. That way every lecture is a refresher and fills in details to an existing knowledge framework. You will also take far better notes if you know the domain ahead of time.

Your current techniques seem focused on during and after class. You can also preview the material on the syllabus, outline it, and make predictions about what you think each lecture will cover. Then when you attend lecture, you already have a framework to plug those concepts into.

Reviewing the material that will be lectured on the day before class is critical. Here's what you should be doing each day: 1) Go to class and pay attention; 2) Do the exercises for the section of the textbook that was covered in that day's lecture, then; 3) Read the section of the textbook that the instructor will be covering the next day. Pay attention to the highlighted boxes where important information, like new formulas or solving methods are imparted. Carefully read all examples in that section. After each example, the textbook usually gives a problem for you to work on your own. Do these. Everyone knows that they should be doing steps 1 and 2, but most people don't even consider doing step 3, or have never been encouraged to do so. If you are a student who struggles with some subjects, the first time you are exposed to new material, your mind may be confused and a little discombobulated and will have lots of little nagging questions. Then hopefully, the second time you are exposed to the material, if you are paying close attention, those little holes get filled in and you have your "aha" moments. "Oh, that's what that meant!" If you don't review the material ahead of time, your discombobulated moments will be occurring during the lecture, and you may never be able to adequately fill in the holes. You want that disorienting experience to occur BEFORE the lecture, so that the lecture becomes the "aha" moment, that fills in the holes that you were first exposed to the night before.

My piece of advice is to know your learning style. I'm an auditory learner so recording lectures and reading aloud help me far more than note taking or writing repeatedly.

Review the chapter before going to lecture. Writing extensive notes while listening to the lecture decreases retention and thus is counterproductive. Ideally, a recorded lecture would be available to refer back to if you missed anything so you could take notes before and after the lecture, allowing you to just focus on learning the sets of information/train of logic being taught in class. Don't wait for your brain to be overloaded while studying. The recommendation is to take a few minutes off every hour to do something that relaxes your brain. But it's also okay to be flexible here - if you are in the middle of wrapping your mind around a large concept, don't force yourself to take a break. Also, don't forget to keep exercise in your schedule no matter how busy you get.

knile, I was going to come in with a link to that same paper. The video was new to me. Thanks!

I haven't really ever made use of this, but I have heard that http://lifehacker.com/5896513/study-before-bed-for-significantly-better-retention can help improve retention of new associations.

Related reading: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf