How to Study (2016)

Ideas on &quot;how to study&quot; in the context of an educational environment fail on the outset because that environment is often the greatest influence that you really can&#x27;t control.<p>Studying ability often becomes a factor of prior exposure, time availability, fluid intelligence, mental stability, and a bunch of other random factors that all need to align reasonably well. For a small fraction of the population, these things will align. For any given person, they&#x27;re not going to align all that well. For some people, they&#x27;re not going to align well at all, and they may not make it.<p>What ends up happening is that the person can&#x27;t truly properly keep up, so they end up surviving instead. And they may succeed in doing just that, but learning will be damaged. Most studying techniques fall short because they do not properly account for this survival mode and are not really the techniques that help someone, well, survive.<p>Proper learning is not rushed and hyper competitive, but what the average student encounters is.<p>Taking very dense notes, for instance, can easily backfire if it takes too much time and if it&#x27;s not truly needed. Knowing what to learn, how to learn it, what not to learn, etc., are all separate skills, and not everyone has them. And it&#x27;s not something that can easily be summarized because it&#x27;s more of a skill than a piece of knowledge, and most of it comes down to <i>your</i> personal strengths as well as weaknesses.<p>There are plenty of successful students who have broken all of these rules and I&#x27;m sure we all know a few.

I disagree almost completely with the article. From my experience, it is almost always an over complication of learning to study a lot at home and to take notes in a special way or whatever.<p>What you should do, in my opinion, is to focus almost exclusively on the ideas explained and try in any way to oppose them, when you find something you feel shouldn&#x27;t be how it is, ask. The mere exploration of the concepts gives deep understanding of them and will require you almost no extra work at home. Often it will literally need no extra work at all. Also, when the teacher answers your question, you will get even deeper insight and so will the teacher (especially when it comes to higher levels of teaching) and most other students who care to learn. Jotting down notes is a nice way to force yourself to formulate the ideas yourself, if you don&#x27;t already do so, but most often, these notes needn&#x27;t and shouldn&#x27;t be read. They should just be written down.

I&#x27;ve found that the best way to learn something is to play with that thing. Doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s an essay, a sentence, a formula, a function, an algorithm, or whatever. The most essential thing is to play with it. Turn it around in your head, try to apply it to different circumstances - even ones where it would seem nonsensical. Everything is just a block or piece of knowledge in a certain shape waiting for you to see if you can fit it into some random kinda-round hole you found.<p>I feel like people approach higher levels of education more like a job than like a game to master. It&#x27;s all the same.

I enjoyed this article and this subject. A small anecdote to share.<p>I had a B average after my freshman year. During the break, I had dinner with a university professor. I asked him how I could improve my grades and he shared the following points of advice.<p>1. On the first day of class observe the students who ask intelligent questions and are engaged. Sit by and study with them.<p>2. Finish small assignments a day before the due date and large assignments a week before. This is a forcing function to 1) manage your time effectively (referenced repeatedly in the article) 2) befriend your TA&#x27;s and professors.<p>This advice helped me improve my grades and I felt a massive lift in my learning ability.

This is a fascinating subject that I&#x27;ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about, as I&#x27;ve continually tried to improve my studying habits in these first two years of medical school.<p>There&#x27;s some great points here. One for discussion that I&#x27;d disagree with is copying your notes. Here in medical school, it&#x27;s literally temporally impossible to copy your notes and actually get to all the material. It&#x27;s definitely an extremely effective way to learn the material, but unfortunately when you have so much material in so little time, it&#x27;s just not feasible (FWIW, an average semester has 25 credits of courses for me).<p>I&#x27;d also add in spaced repetition studying - this has been an extremely effective method of studying for me, and I&#x27;ve learned more via spaced repetition studying of previously made flashcards than I have from reading the textbooks. And it does a phenomenal job of isolating the material you need to know from what you already know.

The opening sounds to me a bit like &quot;if you have to take a job in order to afford to be here, then you don&#x27;t deserve to be here&quot;. I doubt that&#x27;s intentional but it&#x27;s not very well written - it sounds like accusing poor students that their main problem is not needing to be able to afford food and rent but &quot;not prioritising their education enough&quot;.<p>&gt; If you must work (in order to make ends meet), you should realize the limitations that this imposes on your study time.<p>What exactly is such a student supposed to do with this observation, other than conclude &quot;education is not for people like me&quot;?

Good article, but I think it&#x27;s important to change study tactics depending on the topic - and your own personality.<p>Eg - when I was studying maths and physics, I found the best thing was to not take notes in class, but spend all my time trying to fully comprehend the concept.<p>When I was studying french, flash cards and memorisation schedules were key to the hardest part of it - vocab. I&#x27;m sure there is a better way to do this however, I am dyslexic, but I still only scraped through even though I put in the most effort.<p>When working on project based assignments (such as design), I found the best way was to ensure I was fully excited about my idea - that would power me through. And test early.<p>Basically - match the method to the subject, and yourself.

What&#x27;s with all the comics?<p>For anyone who&#x27;s completed a CS degree, how much studying did you do per night. I understand working on projects etc can eat up hours but I don&#x27;t really include that.<p>Back at college just now and starting university in Sept. I had never studied in my life until college (coasted of natural ability all my life) and I&#x27;m finding it difficult to even spend 1hr a night. (Average mark currently is 80%) 5hrs per night seems insane to me.<p>When studying I either understand the concept fully and fire through it rapid. Don&#x27;t understand it and spend ages figuring it out&#x2F;trying to find answers online. Or have no idea, can&#x27;t find anything in the textbooks&#x2F;online and resort to crying in the corner.

I wish someone would have taught me how to study at school or in university. I somehow managed, but I&#x27;m still intimidated and slightly panicking whenever I have to learn&#x2F;memorize something: I simply don&#x27;t know how.

What if learning &quot;how to study&quot; is just a way to distract yourself from learning the material? Finding a learning process might sound more fun and creative, but more than likely it will be a big waste of time. Fortunately, what you&#x27;ll be learning from your study work is more likely to be useful and more fact-based than learning how to study, which is primarily opinion-based.<p>If I was to create a study guide I wouldn&#x27;t tell the student anything they should be doing, but rather ask questions that lead them back to their source material:<p>* What are you learning about currently?<p>* Why do you find it challenging?<p>* Why is it important?<p>* What is the general idea?<p>Learning by applying some memorization technique sounds boring to me, in comparison to curiosity-based learning using socratic&#x2F;thoughtful questioning. Instead of responding to study work with a fight-or-flight response, asking questions allow you to break out of that fearful mindset and start to examine the topic and as you ask questions about it you&#x27;ll start to find little bits of interesting knowledge in it.

This has a lot of great stuff, but I hereby dispute the &#x27;don&#x27;t take notes on a computer&#x27; claims.<p>It is certainly true that typing out notes is generally a bad idea. I have and can take notes on a computer while basically unconscious and getting no benefit from them; transcription is easier than and a distinct activity from taking notes.<p>However, with pen computing, the computer becomes a very useful note taking tool. I can write out my notes in OneNote while recording the lecture. If I miss something or want clarification, I can go back and listen to the lecture, linked up by time with the notes I took.<p>I can go back and search my notes - they are useful for quickly reviewing a topic I may have studied in the past.<p>I like color coding my notes. I can write in any color, recolor after the fact if I want a different structure, and generally add multiple channels of cues for my studying.<p>Digital ink &amp; paper have potential to replace physical notes without the negatives of typing.

&gt;...25 hours that you should be spending studying at home (or in the library)<p>&gt;Dividing that 25 hours by those 5 days gives you 5 hours of studying per night<p>Haha. Final year PhD checking in. I&#x27;ve never, not in my entire life, never, done any more than 2 hours study (outside of classes, lectures or labs) on a single night. My brain would just stop focusing after a couple hours.<p>Plus, why would you need to study if you focus during classes and actively try to understand what&#x27;s going on?

The article was brief and had some good advice, and it sets the issue straight of having priority of school over other activities. School is a full-time job and spending 40 hours&#x2F;week should be expected. A lot of the advice are also just common sense.<p>I also strongly recommend Cal Newport&#x27;s book &quot;How to Become a Straight-A Student&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;How-Become-Straight-Student-Unconventional&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0767922719&#x2F;ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;How-Become-Straight-Student-Unconvent...</a>). I&#x27;ve read a lot of books on studying in college, but I think this one really is one of the best way to study.

The best advice in this article is IMHO in the bottom:<p>&gt; Well, of course, you don&#x27;t have to do all of it at once. Try various of these suggestions to see what works for you.<p>For me to learn, I heavily need to motivation. Hence I usually spend a couple of days pondering before doing anything productive.

Great cartoons! :D

I didn&#x27;t see it mentioned anywhere on this page, but for memorizing, there is one very important insight. How well you remember something directly correlates with how interesting and important you find it. As if your brain is a cache that evicts data based on this priority. If you manage to manipulate yourself into believing that the study material is very important, you can memorize incredible amounts of data. Well, the optimal case would be if it&#x27;s actually important stuff, of course! If you start thinking &quot;why does this even matter&quot;, the memories instantly start to decompose.<p>Also, at uni, I learned that taking notes in maths classes is a recipe for disaster. How come? The mere act of writing down and arranging formulas on my sheet takes enough thinking power that I can no longer follow the lecture. What&#x27;s better, having one single good shot at understanding things, or having not understood things and the incomprehensible scribbling of your notes also makes zero sense without the professor&#x27;s explanation? The former for me. As long as I know the broad subject names, I can read up on my own.