*Focus on Learning, Not Grades. Grades are just an artificial marker used to assess how much you’ve learned. While they are useful as a measurement tool, focusing on grades over understanding and learning useful ideas wastes your time. Look for ways you can use the material you are learning and focus on understanding it first, put grades afterwards.
*Read Papers Upside Down. A good editing habit when checking over your essays and assignments is to read them upside down. This prevents you from speed reading the page and missing grammatical or sentence structure errors. This also gives you a better feeling of how an essay might be read through fresh eyes, letting you improve your style.
*Schedule a Balance. Compress your work and studying into the weekdays and mornings so you don’t need to work all of the time. Good habits also involve taking time for rest as well.
*The 10-Year Old Rule. Pretend you had to teach everything in your course to a ten-year old. Could you do it? While advanced theoretical physics might not be comprehensible by a young child, the idea is that you should be able to simplify your subject into easily understandable pictures and metaphors. If you can do this for yourself, it will make your job far easier for remembering later.
The graph shown here is called “The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve”.
It indicates the rate at which human beings forget new information. As you can see, we forget almost 70% of what we learn within 24 hours. Even in the first 1 hour, you’ll forget more than half of what you’ve learned. Solution to this problem of forgetfulness, is regular revising and practice of the knowledge and skills over a period of time. Here are some techniques to increase your memory.
1. Regular revision – Recall what you have learned on a regular basis. The hour/day/week/month model is one. Ebbinghaus Studies also found that a stable long-term memory is established only after an average of 7 repetitions. That means you need to review a same lesson several times before you can effectively retain it in memory.
Let’s say on day 1 you learned a lesson. They should be reviewed once to twice again on the same day, once more on the second day, once more in a week, once more in two weeks, and again in a month. Research suggests that the spacing is different for individuals. Recent research has shown that rehearsal just prior to sleep is a powerful technique.
Let’s say on day 1 you learned a lesson. They should be reviewed once to twice again on the same day, once more on the second day, once more in a week, once more in two weeks, and again in a month. Research suggests that the spacing is different for individuals. Recent research has shown that rehearsal just prior to sleep is a powerful technique.
2. Take notes and prepare a short note – Write up the lesson, in your own words with diagrams, and prepare a summary or short note of the lesson. This can result in dramatic increases in learning (20-30%). Then re-read a few times afterwords.
3. Repetition – Before starting a new study session, repeat (not in parrot fashion) the what you’ve studied previously. Take five or ten minutes at the start to revise the previous content.
4. Practice – Do questions, past papers after the course. This prevents reliance on short-term memory and gives you a chance to develop long term knowledge and skills.
3. Repetition – Before starting a new study session, repeat (not in parrot fashion) the what you’ve studied previously. Take five or ten minutes at the start to revise the previous content.
4. Practice – Do questions, past papers after the course. This prevents reliance on short-term memory and gives you a chance to develop long term knowledge and skills.
