Transcription
To learn better and succeed more easily in class, it's simple, here's the secret: you have to highlight your notes, as much as possible, reread them dozens of times, and then make flashcards, on which you will rewrite the entire course, but very small and very dense, with abbreviations. So no, actually not at all, if you do that: stop, it doesn't work. But rest assured, I will tell you what works, and I won't just tell you what I think works, I won't try to sell you my personal miracle method. No, I will talk to you about learning principles that have been evaluated by hundreds of scientific studies, for several decades now. Methods that work much better for learning, whether you are in middle school, high school, or higher education. Unfortunately, these are methods that are not necessarily taught to us at school, and there are many misconceptions on the subject. Notably very popular techniques, which, in fact, have not proven themselves at all, scientifically speaking. I have given examples: rereading your notes many times, highlighting them with many colors, or making flashcards. These are not very effective techniques, but not too tiring, which give you the illusion of mastering the subject. It doesn't work well, but it gives a clear conscience. And it's quite incredible to see that alongside this, there are learning principles and techniques that have been proven by scientific studies, tested in many subjects, at different levels, and which are surprisingly little known. And I would like not only to try to help you all, in your learning situations, but also to contribute a little to debunking the tenacious myth that academic success is just a matter of natural talent, of innate ability to be good in one subject or another. Of course, we are all different and there are natural affinities, but your abilities are far from being fixed, and the way you approach studying has a huge impact: you have much more control than you think, over your success. And again, to be clear: I am not a guru, I have no book or training to sell on the subject, I do not do coaching. I just want to tell you about what I discovered in scientific literature, and share with you what I would have liked to know earlier in my studies.
Well, to start, what are we trying to do, fundamentally? What is our objective when we try to learn something. What would it mean to learn "better"? Obviously, it will depend on the subject and the level at which you are studying, but the same elements are always found. At a first level, learning means memorizing. Memorizing texts, facts, formulas, etc. This is true in all subjects and at all levels: from primary to higher education, from languages to sciences. You always have to memorize things. But it doesn't stop there: you are also asked to understand, that is to say, to acquire mastery of the concepts presented to you. How different factual knowledge is articulated together. Memorizing the text of a lecture, and mastering the ideas it contains, is not the same thing. You can memorize the definition and formula of kinetic energy by heart, if you don't really understand what it represents, you are not very advanced in using these notions. Then at a third level, you are asked to "solve problems". I use this term quite generically, it can refer to a chemistry exercise as well as a geography document analysis, or the answer to a dissertation topic. And to solve problems, you need the ability to mobilize and use the knowledge and understanding you have. This idea of being able to mobilize what one has learned is something very important that I will talk about a lot. It is what gradually moves from knowing to knowing how to do. And finally, sometimes, you are asked to show creativity. For example, to imagine a way to solve a very open-ended problem, or for a high-level dissertation. And what is really very important here, in this diagram, is that these abilities are built on top of each other. Each is essential for those above it. One might think that in the age of Wikipedia, all the knowledge in the world is just a click away, and therefore memorizing things doesn't matter. But that's false, even at the highest level, for creative tasks, you need to have solid knowledge. Creativity is very often about combining things in new ways, and it requires knowledge that is available and flexible, that can be mobilized in a situation that doesn't necessarily call for it.
In short, our objective when we learn, and when we want to fully master a subject, is to know how to do all of this: memorize, understand, solve, create. Again, the distribution will vary depending on the subject and the level, but you always find this. And you will see that the methods we will discuss will first particularly focus on memorization, because it is the foundation of understanding, and of the ability to create and solve problems by knowing how to mobilize what we have learned.
To be able to present you with the best methods and make you understand their scientific justifications, I will use a model from cognitive sciences, which helps to understand how our memory works. In this model, we distinguish two forms of memory: working memory and long-term memory. Working memory contains what you have in mind at a given moment. What you are explicitly aware of, right here, right now, and on which you can reason. This working memory receives, in particular, sensory perceptions to which we decide to pay attention: visual, auditory, tactile, textual, etc. But it has a very limited capacity: we can only hold a few concepts in mind simultaneously. For its part, long-term memory, as its name indicates, allows the storage of knowledge and concepts that we will retain for a long time, beyond the very limited time span of our working memory. And this long-term memory has the capacity to reorganize itself, to consolidate. For those who like analogies, we can compare these two memories to the RAM and the hard drive of a computer. One is easily accessible and allows you to work on information, the other is larger and is used for long-term storage. Between these two types of memory, there are two operations: encoding, which allows the transfer of information from working memory to long-term memory. And retrieval, which does the opposite: it loads knowledge that has been stored in your long-term memory into your working memory. And obviously, that's not all, there is another process at work: forgetting. When you remember a phone number just long enough to dial it, you only put it in your working memory, and then it will quickly evaporate, without going any further. But there is also forgetting with long-term memory: things you knew, but that you have progressively forgotten.
And yet sometimes, we all have that feeling of relearning or rediscovering something we once knew, and saying: "Oh yes, in fact, I wouldn't have remembered it, but I knew it." And what happens in this case is not really that we had forgotten, but that we can no longer recall it. The knowledge was perhaps still there somewhere in long-term memory, but retrieval failed, it could not happen. One way to visualize what is happening is that when you store something in your long-term memory, the information lodges there with small hooks, small handles, which allow retrieval. These are called cues, or retrieval cues. And very often, with long-term memory, what is called "forgetting" is actually the progressive loss of these retrieval cues. The knowledge is there, but it's impossible to retrieve it, to grab it to load it into your working memory. And this notion of retrieval cues is extremely important because the more there are associated with a piece of knowledge, the more easily that knowledge will be available, usable, and flexible.
And this is very important in cognitive tasks like problem-solving or creativity. Remembering well, with many cues, allows you to bring out the right knowledge at the right time, and sometimes in an original and creative way. Another important element about how long-term memory works: it doesn't just store factual, raw knowledge, like a date or a formula. It also allows the storage of conceptual knowledge, understanding, in the form of what are called mental schemas. A mental schema is a set of concepts whose links and articulations are understood, and which form a coherent whole, which can be used to make deductions, reasonings. And as you probably know, when you have truly understood something, it is always easier to retrieve and mobilize than knowledge learned by heart. Whether we are talking about a formula or a historical fact, it is always easier to remember it precisely if you have understood the role it plays in the context, if it is part of a more global coherent mental schema.
Well, thanks to this model of memory, we can clearly see what we are trying to achieve with our learning methods: encode effectively, promote consolidation in long-term memory, memorize conceptual knowledge in the form of mental schemas, and improve retrieval thanks to cues that make our knowledge available and mobilizable. But before going further and explaining how we can do all this, I would like to debunk one of the most tenacious myths in learning: that of learning styles. You know, "Oh, I'm more of a visual learner," "Oh no, I'm more of an auditory learner, I need to hear," etc. Many people think they have a preferred style that allows them to learn better. Well, that's completely false. It's an idea that was put forward by someone one day, and since then there have been literally dozens of scientific studies on this notion, and it's just false. You may have a style you prefer, but it's just a personal preference, it's not linked to learning better, to the effectiveness of one mode or another. On the other hand, what has been observed is that we all learn better by using multiple modes: visual, textual, auditory, tactile. This is what is called multimodality, and we will talk about it again.
Well, enough talking, it was important for me to explain the foundations, but now let's get to the methods that really work.
One thing we often hear is that repetition is the basis of memorization. And it's true, except in special cases, you can't retain something by seeing it just once and then thinking about something else. You have to repeat, to expose your brain to the information to be memorized several times. But there is a fundamental principle, that of spaced repetition. To present it, we often use a curve like this. You have just learned something for the first time, you have managed to transfer it from your working memory to your long-term memory. No difficulty remembering it fifteen minutes later, your recall is at 100%. And then time passes, and you start to forget, quite quickly. After a few days, impossible to remember, the knowledge seems lost. Even if you had spent a lot of time on it at the beginning. And what you need to do is reactivate it before you forget, say the next day, so as to interrupt the forgetting process. You relearn it, and you are back at 100%. But this time, the act of reviewing before complete forgetting will help to consolidate, to solidify the memory in your long-term memory. It will slightly strengthen the neural pathway that allows retrieval. From then on, you will again start to forget progressively, but at a slower pace than before. Except that after a few days, the same principle applies: you must reactivate before forgetting, which allows you to return to 100%, but also to consolidate the memory a little more. And from then on, its erosion will be even slower. And so on.
What this shows is that you need to distribute your learning over time, you need to space it out, and in principle, increasingly. It's useless to work like crazy the first time you learn something, and then do nothing to maintain the knowledge. Contrary to a widespread belief, if you reread something 100 times in a row the first time, you won't "engrave it in your memory" at all, it will be forgotten just as quickly. Unless you reactivate it several times afterwards, spacing it out more and more. And each reactivation will be all the more effective if forgetting has begun, but without having gone all the way. In practice, this means that if you take a given subject that you need to master, it is better to work on it 8 times for an hour, spread over several days, than 8 hours straight condensed into one day. And this is particularly important if you have exams at the end of the year or semester. If you work on the subject thoroughly at the beginning of the year, and you don't reactivate it before the final revision, you won't revise, you will just have to relearn everything. Ideally, you should maintain it a little throughout the year. Of course, this requires discipline and anticipation, but it's to avoid wasting your initial efforts. Obviously, the question you will ask yourself is: how often should we reactivate? Well, for the first reactivation, you should do it the next day. This will have allowed time for initial consolidation in long-term memory, which we know occurs partly during sleep. For the second reactivation, two or three days later. Then the following week, and then the following month. The ideal way to apply this method is to create a reactivation schedule to ensure you don't let something you've learned rest for too long and risk losing it. There isn't really a magic number after which you will be sure to have acquired knowledge forever, but let's say that 7 is a good order of magnitude. So, the first principle is spaced repetition, and therefore spreading your efforts over time. Let's now look at the second principle, which combines very well with this one: that of self-testing.
Let's go back to my forgetting curve: after 24 hours, I've started to forget, it's time to reactivate. But how do we reactivate, concretely? A simple and comfortable way is to reread the information to be memorized. For example, we reread our notes the next day, as if we were learning them again. On my cognitive diagram, this corresponds to repeating the encoding procedure. We transfer the memory from working memory to long-term memory again. And indeed, reactivation by re-encoding works a little, there is a slight effect of reinforcement and consolidation in long-term memory.
The problem is that, often, when we do this, we are not necessarily very focused. By just rereading things we have already learned, we easily tell ourselves "yeah, that's fine, I knew that." The reactivation is passive, and we delude ourselves a bit about what we really remembered. And what is much more effective is to reactivate in the other direction, through retrieval. That is to say, by trying to remember, to bring out knowledge from our long-term memory. Generally, we tend to do this retrieval work only when we need it, that is to say, on the day of the exam. Whereas we should do it for revision, that is to say, get into the habit of self-testing, before checking the answers. If you have to revise dates, for example, rather than passively rereading the notes that contain them, try to answer questions that require you to remember them. It's a bit more tiring, I grant you, but this effort will precisely strengthen the neural pathways and retrieval cues, and thus improve the durability and availability of this knowledge. And all studies show very clearly that this active retrieval is much more effective than rereading, which works passively. On my forgetting curve, by reactivating actively, through retrieval, you will obtain much less erosion afterwards than if you had simply reread and re-encoded the information.
And so the ideal is to combine the first two methods we've just seen: active retrieval through self-testing, but spaced out. For this, a simple and powerful technique is the Leitner box. Leitner was a German science journalist who invented this method in the 1970s. To practice it, you will need a box with 7 compartments, you can also use 7 envelopes, and small index cards. When you want to learn something new, a definition, a formula, a date, a fact, you write it in the form of a question on the front of a card, and you write the expected answer on the back. And you put the card in the first compartment. From then on, you will consult the different compartments each day and try to answer the questions written on the cards. When you answer correctly, you place the card in the next compartment. And if you are wrong, you put it back in the first compartment. And to ensure that there is the correct spacing as learning progresses, you will not consult all the compartments each time. The first will be every day, the second only every two days, the third perhaps every 4 days, etc. To help, you can use a small calendar that tells you each day which compartments to empty. With this method, when you answer a question correctly that is in the 7th compartment, it means you have succeeded 7 times in a row, and with increasingly spaced intervals, so you can consider it done! I made myself a small system with a plastic box and cardboard cards, but if you want, there are also mobile apps that do this, for example Anki, which I haven't really tested but which seems quite popular. One of the advantages of this method is that you have immediate feedback on what you know. And you automatically work on all the things you are not comfortable with, since they return to the first compartment. It avoids deluding yourself about what you really know. Obviously, this requires discipline and effort, but unfortunately, effective, restful, and easy methods don't exist! Beyond the Leitner method, generally speaking, all methods that allow self-testing are good for consolidating memory through retrieval. So this can also be questions or multiple-choice quizzes in textbooks, on dedicated websites. And if your teachers give you some to do, all the better. Remember that the primary objective of these small tests is not to grade you or evaluate you, the act of testing yourself is an integral part of the learning and memorization process. With self-tests, it's not the result that counts, it's the journey!
Another principle that works very well, and which combines well with the previous two, is diversification. This has been particularly demonstrated in scientific disciplines: the idea is that if you have several slightly different chapters to revise, it is better to mix them in small sessions, rather than doing all of one, then all of the other. Indeed, one of the challenges when solving problems, especially in science, is to correctly identify the type of problem and the right method to use to solve it. Mixing revisions on several similar chapters will increase your ability to discriminate problems well, to better see similarities and differences, and thus to choose the right methods. By mixing, we create more retrieval cues and facilitate bringing out the right knowledge at the right time. Well, that makes three principles: spaced repetition, self-testing, and diversification. So far, I've talked a lot about memory, and you might be thinking that in your field of study, that's not the most important thing. But we will now see how to transfer all these benefits to conceptual understanding and problem-solving.
When I talked about self-testing earlier, I mentioned, for example, doing small multiple-choice quizzes. Multiple-choice quizzes are good, but since you choose from a pre-made list, it's less effective than trying to find and formulate the answer to the question yourself. And even to go further, rather than answering questions, you can try to test yourself simply by trying to write down everything you remember. This is called free recall, and it works particularly well because it often forces you to rephrase things in your own words. And it's part of a group of methods called generative learning, or constructive learning. The general idea is that to truly make something your own, you have to put your own effort into interpreting it, reorganizing it, structuring it in a way that gives it meaning, and that speaks to you. For your brain, this means actively creating those little mental schemas I mentioned, which structure knowledge in long-term memory, and which are much easier to remember and mobilize. It is this active process of constructing mental schemas that will allow you to acquire deep, conceptual, and interconnected knowledge. The active aspect is very important, because otherwise it's easy to give yourself the impression of working by going on autopilot. You know: you reread the same passage many times, but without really being present. Or in class, you reflexively note down what the professor says, but your thoughts are elsewhere. As if the words went from ear to pen without really passing through the brain. To avoid this, you need to adopt an active posture towards the content you are trying to assimilate. You need to think about it, to make it your own. Obviously, this requires more effort, but it also activates higher cognitive functions that will improve our understanding, our long-term memory, and our ability to mobilize knowledge. I think you know that we remember much better what we understand and what makes sense to us. Small demonstration: here are some sequences of letters, try to remember them. Done, not easy, huh. Now here are other sequences of letters. Ah, much easier right away! There are as many letters as before, but here they form a pattern that makes sense, that we can connect to prior knowledge. This is the case in all school subjects, take history, for example. It is much easier to remember historical facts if you understand how they are linked, their consequences, their relationship to other events, or to the present world. And the same applies to biology or philosophy. To do this, and to approach learning actively, you need to make the effort to think for yourself about what the key concepts are, what meaning you can give them, how you can organize and connect them to what you already know. It is this work that will allow you to create your own mental schemas, which are easier to store in long-term memory. And the more we progress and learn new things, the more we will be able to make connections, and therefore create retrieval cues.
So all these recommendations are quite theoretical, let's see how we can do it in practice. There are many complementary ways, but they all have one thing in common: they require motivation and discipline. To start, when you are in class, take active notes. A good way is to use the margin, it's there for that. Write down questions that come to mind, concepts that seem important to you, additional examples you find, links it evokes for you with other notions or real-life situations. Don't be afraid to speculate or make mistakes, write in pencil, it doesn't matter, you'll correct it later, the important thing is to keep your brain in an active posture that will prepare it to learn all this better afterwards. After class, do free recall. Take a blank sheet of paper, and write down everything you remember. But really everything, and don't stop until you're really dry. Force yourself to spend a certain amount of time on it, say 5 or 10 minutes. The further you reach into your memory, the stronger the anchor will be. Ideally, you should do it the same evening after class, not the day before the next class. Yes, it requires discipline, but the idea is to ensure an initial anchor, before the first night of sleep. Then when you work on your notes, try to rephrase things in your own way, with your own words. Just highlighting the notes doesn't do much, it requires too little effort. And similarly, making flashcards, if it's just to copy exactly the same thing smaller, denser, and with abbreviations, is very poor. It's almost doable on autopilot, without thinking. To work on your notes actively, I know a history-geography teacher who, in middle school, had his students do something very simple: he systematically asked them to prepare 5 questions about the lesson they had just done for the next class. This forced students to think about the lesson, to select what was important, to imagine questions in their own words, and the answers that went with them. And moreover, if you adopt this technique, it will create questions that can be used for self-testing. In the same vein, my teacher in preparatory math explained to us how to work on our lessons actively, by trying to enrich them, by asking ourselves questions. Why was this definition chosen, and not another. Are there several proofs for this theorem. What counter-examples do I find if I remove a hypothesis, etc. A very effective reformulation method, which works for all subjects, is schematization. Try to create your own diagrams to represent the key concepts, and how they are linked together. This allows combining textual and visual. As we said, it's the multiplication of learning modes that is important. To do it even better, there is a method I love, which I use a lot, it's the mind mapping technique. It's a method of organizing ideas that consists of trying to summarize things on a single sheet, using a tree structure. The main concept in the center, then successive branches to express ideas, sub-ideas, etc. In a mind map, we try to highlight links, groupings, or differences. We use small drawings as much as possible, and color, again to stimulate both textual and visual. And we also have to create it by hand, to also have the tactile or kinesthetic aspect. The mind mapping method ticks many effective learning principles, and I find it fantastic when you have to actively grasp a course, by questioning it and reformulating it in your own way. And it's not just my personal opinion: there are many studies that show that methods like mind mapping, which combine visual schematization and relationships between concepts, have a formidable effect on memory and understanding. I really encourage you to study this technique, with a small warning, however. You need to take some time to train yourself and truly make it your own. The implementation of the method should not be tedious for you, or block you for fear of doing it wrong. I might make a dedicated video on the subject one day.
Let's move on to a last well-known way of doing generative learning: trying to explain the content you are trying to learn and understand to others. This is something I have experienced many times when preparing my videos: when you try to convey something clearly, you quickly realize if you haven't really understood it. It's a bit of the ultimate revealer that shows the difference between superficial mastery, knowing things by heart, knowing how to blindly use formulas, and true conceptual understanding. The ideal for this is to work in groups and alternately play the role of the explainer and the listener. But to start simple, you can try to do it on yourself. Imagine explaining what you have learned to your past self. Another way, popularized by physicist Richard Feynman, is to try to pretend to explain it to an 8-year-old child.
So, that's a lot of information, it's time to conclude and do a quick summary of what we've seen today.
First point: there really are more effective methods than others, extensively tested and validated by scientific studies, so use them. Because your abilities are not fixed, you have much more control than you imagine over your learning. On the other hand, I'm not saying it will be easy or restful. These methods require regularity, motivation, and a form of discipline. And I've said it several times, they are not comfortable, they require effort, but that's also why they work. But at least we don't delude ourselves with reassuring but ineffective methods. Generally speaking, a very important quality to develop is your ability to take a step back and reflect on how you learn, how you approach problems, how you judge what works or doesn't work in a given context. This is sometimes called metacognition, the ability to reflect on your own thought processes. I've presented many techniques today, and none of them is superior to the others. You need to choose and combine, trying to respect the general principles of spacing, self-testing, and generative learning. Personally, if I were to go back to middle school, high school, or higher education, I would at least use the Leitner box and mind maps, with perhaps some free recall in the evening after class, and creating questions for my Leitner box. Obviously, as I said, all this needs to be adapted according to the subject, your level of study, and not all techniques will be useful in the same way. In any case, I'm putting lots of references in the description, scientific articles, books, blogs, and people who inspired me. And a big thank you in particular to Elena Pasquinelli, who provided me with many references on these subjects. That's all for today, see you on the Science Étonnante Discord to continue the discussion. Subscribe if you haven't already, and we'll see you very soon for a new video, goodbye!