【Insider】4 Strategies For Remembering Everything You Learn (1380) If youre going to learn anything, you need two kinds of prior knowledge: • knowledge about the subject at hand, like math, history, or programming • knowledge about how learning actually works The bad news: Our education system kinda skips one of them, which is terrifying, given that your ability to learn is such a huge predictor of success in life, from achieving in academics to getting ahead at work. It all requires mastering skill after skill. Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge, shares psych writer Annie Murphy Paul. Were comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself — the metacognitive aspects of learning — is more hit-or-miss, and it shows. To wit, new education research shows that low-achieving students have substantial deficits in their understanding of the cognitive strategies that allow people to learn well. This, Paul says, suggests that part of the reason students perform poorly is that they dont know a lot about how learning actually works. Its a culture-wide issue. Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis and coauthors of Make It Stick: The Science Of Successful Learning, say that how we teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition. So lets cut through that lore. Here are learning strategies that really work. Force yourself to recall. The least-fun part of effective learning is that its hard. In fact, the Make It Stick authors contend that when learning if difficult, youre doing your best learning, in the same way that lifting a weight at the limit of your capacity makes you strongest. Its simple, though not easy, to take advantage of this: force yourself to recall a fact. Flashcards are a great ally in this, since they force you to supply answers. Dont fall for fluency. When youre reading something and it feels easy, what youre experiencing is fluency. Itll only get you in trouble. Example: Say, for instance, youre at the airport and youre trying to remember which gate your flight to Chicago is waiting for you at. You look at the terminal monitors — its B44. You think to yourself, oh, B44, thats easy. Then you walk away, idly check your phone, and instantly forget where youre going. The alternative: You read the gate number. Then you turn away from the monitor and ask yourself, whats the gate? If you can recall that its B44, youre good to go. Connect the new thing to the old things. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to prior knowledge, the Make It Stick authors write, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later. When youre weaving in new threads into your pre-existing web of knowledge, youre elaborating. One killer technique is to come up with real-life examples of principles youve just uncovered. If youve just learned about slant rhyme, you could read poems that exhibit it. If youve just discovered heat transfer, you could think of the way a warm cup of cocoa disperses warmth into your hands on a cold winters day. Reflect, reflect, reflect. Looking back helps. In a Harvard Business School study, employees who were onboarded to a call center had 22.8% higher performance than the control group when they spent just 15 minutes reflecting on their work at the end of the day. When people have the opportunity to reflect, they experience a boost in self-efficacy, HBS professor Francesca Gino tells us. They feel more confident that they can achieve things. As a result, they put more effort into what theyre doing and what they learn. While reflecting may seem like it leads to working less, it leads to achieving more. SEE ALSO: This 15-Minute Activity Will Make You More Successful At Work
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 03:33:16 +0000