Effective Learning

When I was a medical student, I remember Yurzi used to comment on my style of learning - bring a book in front of TV where he and Muhammad Khanji were around and I would start reading, recalling, summarising and asking them about what I was reading. They were like a wall where I need to throw a ball and it bounced back to me.

I came across recently an article about what are strategies that effective and not effective in learning, by John Dunlosky. He reviewed 10 techniques of learning of variable effectiveness:

HIGH UTILITY
- Practice Testing: active, non-formal recall of material read
- Distributed practice: learning over a distributed period of time

MODERATE UTILITY
- Elaborative interrogation: asking why certain facts is as it is
- Self-explanation: we or others explain the steps taken on solving problem
- Interleaving: mixing different kind of material to be learnt within study session

LOW UTILITY
- summarisation: writing summary of the read subject
- imagery use: forming mental image while reading text
- keyword mnemonic: using keyword to associate with materials
- rereading: restudying text material after initial reading
- highlighting: marking potentially important portion of text while reading

So we know now that having that extra effort to generate and recall that knowledge that we have just read, it will better than rereading and highlighting. Other measures that works include:

1. Give a good spacing and interleaving
Instead of reading the same material many times in one go, try to give some time in between the reading. Do something else in between and go back to the material (interleaving). It will probably double the ability to retain the information.

2. Link the new knowledge to previous knowledge that we already know well
Our minds are not like video camera whereby we remember everything that we read. We have to actively engage the new information, and one way of doing it is by linking to the pre-existing knowledge. I also notice that if I am learning a new concept, I will read it once and try to grasp the core/basic concept. The second time I read the material, I will build a new knowledge on that pre existing materials. Reading from multiple sources will certainly help as your mind will actively compare the pre-existing knowledge and the nw ones - whether they are the same or not.

3. Retrieve knowledge instead of re-reading it.
Try to remember how to say good morning in arabic will impact you much more than reading in the book that says good morning = sobahal khair, even if you read it 10 times more, without actually testing that you could recall it. Retrieving knowledge has been shown to be the most effective method of learning.

4. Understand the material
People who understand the material has better ability to recall it. We don't want to be like the writer in the court, where he/she can write every single word mentioned but has no idea at the end of the day what they meant. Similarly in a class room, you don't want to take notes of everything that the lecturer said. Perhaps you want to read it again - but that will be a double job for you. Try to understand and write down the summary of what being said. The book/internet will give you better explanation on certain things sometimes.

Students who did not perform well sometimes truly did spend a lot of times reading book and re-reading books. Without having to test yourself whether you could generate the knowledge, you have no idea whether what you read or see in the book really stick into your mind or not.

"Put less effort on input and more effort on output"

http://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full