10 Rules of Good and Bad Studying

The text below is an extract from "Learning to Learn" (https://class.coursera.org/learning-001/wiki/view?page=10Rules):

10 Rules of Good Studying

Excerpted from A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel in Math and Science (Even if You Flunked Algebra), by Barbara Oakley, Penguin, July, 2014

1. Use recall. After you read a page, look away and recall the main ideas. Highlight very little, and never highlight anything you haven’t put in your mind first by recalling. Try recalling main ideas when you are walking to class or in a different room from where you originally learned it. An ability to recall—to generate the ideas from inside yourself—is one of the key indicators of good learning.

2. Test yourself. On everything. All the time. Flash cards are your friend.

3. Chunk your problems. Chunking is understanding and practicing with a problem solution so that it can all come to mind in a flash. After you solve a problem, rehearse it. Make sure you can solve it cold—every step. Pretend it’s a song and learn to play it over and over again in your mind, so the information combines into one smooth chunk you can pull up whenever you want.

4. Space your repetition. Spread out your learning in any subject a little every day, just like an athlete. Your brain is like a muscle—it can handle only a limited amount of exercise on one subject at a time.

5. Alternate different problem-solving techniques during your practice. Never practice too long at any one session using only one problem-solving technique—after a while, you are just mimicking what you did on the previous problem. Mix it up and work on different types of problems. This teaches you both how and when to use a technique. (Books generally are not set up this way, so you’ll need to do this on your own.) After every assignment and test, go over your errors, make sure you understand why you made them, and then rework your solutions. To study most effectively, handwrite (don’t type) a problem on one side of a flash card and the solution on the other. (Handwriting builds stronger neural structures in memory than typing.) You might also photograph the card if you want to load it into a study app on your smartphone. Quiz yourself randomly on different types of problems. Another way to do this is to randomly flip through your book, pick out a problem, and see whether you can solve it cold.

6. Take breaks. It is common to be unable to solve problems or figure out concepts in math or science the first time you encounter them. This is why a little study every day is much better than a lot of studying all at once. When you get frustrated with a math or science problem, take a break so that another part of your mind can take over and work in the background.

7. Use explanatory questioning and simple analogies. Whenever you are struggling with a concept, think to yourself, How can I explain this so that a ten-year-old could understand it? Using an analogy really helps, like saying that the flow of electricity is like the flow of water. Don’t just think your explanation—say it out loud or put it in writing. The additional effort of speaking and writing allows you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are learning.

8. Focus. Turn off all interrupting beeps and alarms on your phone and computer, and then turn on a timer for twenty-five minutes. Focus intently for those twenty-five minutes and try to work as diligently as you can. After the timer goes off, give yourself a small, fun reward. A few of these sessions in a day can really move your studies forward. Try to set up times and places where studying—not glancing at your computer or phone—is just something you naturally do.

9. Eat your frogs first. Do the hardest thing earliest in the day, when you are fresh.

10. Make a mental contrast. Imagine where you’ve come from and contrast that with the dream of where your studies will take you. Post a picture or words in your workspace to remind you of your dream. Look at that when you find your motivation lagging. This work will pay off both for you and those you love!

Ten Rules of Bad Studying

Excerpted from A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel in Math and Science (Even if You Flunked Algebra), by Barbara Oakley, Penguin, July, 2014

Avoid these techniques—they can waste your time even while they fool you into thinking you’re learning!

1. Passive rereading—sitting passively and running your eyes back over a page. Unless you can prove that the material is moving into your brain by recalling the main ideas without looking at the page, rereading is a waste of time.

2. Letting highlights overwhelm you. Highlighting your text can fool your mind into thinking you are putting something in your brain, when all you’re really doing is moving your hand. A little highlighting here and there is okay—sometimes it can be helpful in flagging important points. But if you are using highlighting as a memory tool, make sure that what you mark is also going into your brain.

3. Merely glancing at a problem’s solution and thinking you know how to do it. This is one of the worst errors students make while studying. You need to be able to solve a problem step-by-step, without looking at the solution.

4. Waiting until the last minute to study. Would you cram at the last minute if you were practicing for a track meet? Your brain is like a muscle—it can handle only a limited amount of exercise on one subject at a time.

5. Repeatedly solving problems of the same type that you already know how to solve. If you just sit around solving similar problems during your practice, you’re not actually preparing for a test—it’s like preparing for a big basketball game by just practicing your dribbling.

6. Letting study sessions with friends turn into chat sessions. Checking your problem solving with friends, and quizzing one another on what you know, can make learning more enjoyable, expose flaws in your thinking, and deepen your learning. But if your joint study sessions turn to fun before the work is done, you’re wasting your time and should find another study group.

7. Neglecting to read the textbook before you start working problems. Would you dive into a pool before you knew how to swim? The textbook is your swimming instructor—it guides you toward the answers. You will flounder and waste your time if you don’t bother to read it. Before you begin to read, however, take a quick glance over the chapter or section to get a sense of what it’s about.

8. Not checking with your instructors or classmates to clear up points of confusion. Professors are used to lost students coming in for guidance—it’s our job to help you. The students we worry about are the ones who don’t come in. Don’t be one of those students.

9. Thinking you can learn deeply when you are being constantly distracted. Every tiny pull toward an instant message or conversation means you have less brain power to devote to learning. Every tug of interrupted attention pulls out tiny neural roots before they can grow.

10. Not getting enough sleep. Your brain pieces together problem-solving techniques when you sleep, and it also practices and repeats whatever you put in mind before you go to sleep. Prolonged fatigue allows toxins to build up in the brain that disrupt the neural connections you need to think quickly and well. If you don’t get a good sleep before a test, NOTHING ELSE YOU HAVE DONE WILL MATTER.

Learning to Learn Syllabus

Learning topics:

• Focused and diffuse modes of thinking.
• Key techniques proven by research to help students learn most efficiently
• Illusions of learning
• Memory
• Chunking
• Sleep
• Metaphor, story, and visualization in learning
• Transfer of ideas and concepts from one area to another
• Deliberate practice
• Interleaving
• Procrastination
• Testing
• Mindset
• Working with others in learning
• Cultural similarities and differences in learning
• Life-long learning and broadening your passions
• Learning independently

Course objectives:

• Explain the difference between focused and diffuse modes of thinking. Be able to practically apply this knowledge to solve problems and understand concepts with less frustration.
• Relate key techniques proven by research to help students learn most efficiently
• Describe common illusions of learning, and explain how to most effectively help yourself to avoid these illusions.
• Explain how working memory and long term memory differ from one another.
• Explain what a chunk is, and how and why you can and should enhance your chunking skills.
• Relate latest research findings explaining why sleep is so important in learning and memory.
• Use metaphor, story, and visualization to allow pre-existing neural scaffolds to help in improving memory as well as to assist in learning more quickly and deeply
• Transfer, deliberate practice, and interleaving
• Apply proven and effective techniques dealing with procrastination.
• Describe the most important aspects of proper test preparation.
• Explain why multi-tasking (trying to do more than one task at the same time) makes it more difficult to grasp concepts.
• Explain the importance of “mindset” in learning. Describe how some famous people in history defied all odds to go from failure to success through a change in their mindset.
• Explain the advantages and disadvantages of working with other students in your studies.When would you want to work with other students? When would it be better to work alone?
• As a consequence of your interactions with other students in this course, explain some of the commonalities and differences of learners from around the world.
• Prepare yourself to be a "life long learner" who is able to learn well independently.

Deliberate Practice

We've all heard the saying that practice makes perfect. But is it enough to simply practice the same routine or task over-and-over in order to become a true expert at something?

Deliberate practice is the process involved in practising the task or activity that one is trying to master - but focusing specifically on the bits that one is not so good at.

For example: a tennis player may need to focus on her serve in order to improve their game. So they might spend many sessions deliberately practising the serve which they're not very good at, to improve their serve. Over time this practice will results in a much greater improvement in the server. This improvement of the serve will contribute to the overall improvement of their ability to play tennis.

So what's going on inside the brain when we're deliberately practising? 

Recall the two thinking modes: focused and diffuse. When we practice something we're in the focused mode. What we're doing is creating that neural pathway (like the way the pinball moves from target to target) every time we practice something.

The problem is: the specific neural pathway involved in completing a task needs to be repeated in order for the brain to be able to recall it later quickly.

This process of the brain recalling previously practised neural pathways is called chunking. If I want to put my jumper on it requires very little thought. This is because, over time, I have deliberately practised getting dressed so much that all of the individual tasks (neural pathways) that make up the overall process have been chunked together.

So by using deliberate practice we can turn a task or action that we're not so good at (such as learning to ride a bicycle) into something that comes very easily. Once the neural pathway (in the focused mode) has been walked enough times it becomes engraved in our memory as a chunk.

Further reading: The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.

Procrastination

We've all experienced that feeling of knowing we're meant to me doing a boring or tedious task, but instead we do something else that's more fun or interesting. This is procrastination: doing something more fun instead of the important task that needs to be completed.

In this post I want to look at three important aspects of procrastination:

1. Why do we procrastinate?
2. Where does procrastination fit into the learning process?
3. How can we stop procrastinating?

With the aim that by the end of this post you'll have a better understanding of why we procrastinate and how we can become better learners by eliminating procrastination.

Why Do We Procrastinate?

Research involving Brain scans has shown that when we procrastinate we're basically avoiding pain. That is: when you think about doing that (seemingly) boring task such as you're accounts, maths homework or housework the part of your brain that deals with pain kicks into action.

So what do we do to soothe that pain?

We do something that's more enjoyable and causes the pain to drift away. We watch a YouTube video, play a game, talk to friends: we procrastinate.

So in a nutshell: procrastination is the process of avoiding a task which triggers a painful response in our brain and replacing that task with an activity that causes us to experience pleasure.

Where Does Procrastination Fit Into The Learning Process?

Procrastination is incredibly harmful to the learning process. This is because learning to master a new skill requires deliberate practice, that is: practising the parts you're not so good at (or the things you don't enjoy so much).

So deliberate practice involves practising the things you're not very good at in order to gain mastery. But the problem is: practising the difficult bits is often painful, and what happens when we have a painful task to complete? We procrastinate.

Here we have a vicious cycle: In order to master a new skill we need to practice the things we're not very good at. This can be a painful process and, as humans, we tend to avoid painful things and replace them with pleasurable (often less important) things.

In other words: procrastination is the Achilles heel of learning. You might have the greatest mind for learning new things in the world. But if you can't get past that painful deliberate practice stage, then you're destined for failure.

How Can We Stop Procrastinating?

Now we understand how destructive procrastination is, how do we stop it?

Research has shown that we often perceive a boring task to be more unenjoyable than it actually is. In other words, once you start a seemingly boring tasks (such as house work) it's actually not that bad once you get going.

So one approach to stop procrastinating is to re-thing the way we approach these seemingly boring tasks. Instead of thinking "I really don't want to do this task, it's boring" we could think "the benefit of doing this housework is a tidy, happy home, and I enjoy cleaning".

The only problem with this approach is that is requires a lot of mental energy and will power in order to get going in the first place. This is energy that's simply wasted and could be better spent on the task at hand.

This is where techniques like the Pomodoro Technique can be handy.

In a nutshell the Pomodoro Technique involves setting a timer for 25 minutes and focusing solely on that one specific task for the entire 25 minutes. This means no emails, no phone, no distractions. You just work on the task without interruption and without getting distracted.

I've personally found that once I start the Pomodoro timer I then get into the flow of work fairly quickly and don't require the timer for the rest of the session. I often use the timer to get me started into a working session after lunch or some time when I'm feeling a little lazy.

So there we have it: hopefully you now understand the science behind why we procrastinate, the dangers of procrastination to the learning process and how we can eliminate procrastination to experience better learning.

Focused and Diffuse Modes of Thinking

The human brain has two main modes of thinking Focused and Diffuse. These two modes play a vital part in our learning process and we're going to explore how they can work together effectively.

It often helps to use metaphors when learning new concepts. So to help better understand these two thinking modes we're going to use the analogy of a pinball machine:


Image source: http://www.bmigaming.com/Games/Pictures/pinball-machines/metallica-pinball-machine-pro-professional-model-stern-pinball.jpg

Imagine the pinball machine is your brain. A pinball machine consists of lots of targets for the ball to hit. In this scenario the pinball is the thought in your brain, and the pinball targets are the neurons in your brain. In the two different modes of thinking these targets are arranged slightly differently.

Focused Mode

This mode can be thought of as a pinball machine that has its targets closely packed together. When we're thinking in this mode a thought is like the pinball bouncing off the targets in a specific pattern, as shown by the red line below:

Image source: Learning How to Learn, week 1 lecture 1

The targets in this image can be thought of as neurons in the brain and the red line is the path from neuron to neuron which makes up the thought pattern.

This thought mode is used when we're focusing on a specific task such as a difficult maths problem. Our thought pattern is very specific and therefore the pinball takes on a tightly packed route form neuron to neuron.

Diffuse Mode

In this mode the pinball is a little more free to roam around. As you can see in the image below the thought (represented by the red line) is able to move around much more freely without hitting as many targets:

Image source: Learning How to Learn, week 1 lecture 1

Again, the targets in this pinball layout can be represented as neurons. In this diffuse mode we're able to move freely between large areas of neurons. This is especially helpful when we're trying to be creative or search our memory for knowledge.

One major point to note is that the brain cannot be in both states at the same time. Much like a coin has two sides but only one side can be seen at any time.

The images of Focused and Diffuse mode above show the opposing sides of the same coin to help understand this concept.

The Importance of Focused and Diffuse

So why are these two opposing states of mind important?

Well, if you were to spend all of your time in just the focused mode for example then you would only be learning a new concept or focusing on solving a specific problem - but you might not be able to recall this new concept later.

However, the importance of the diffuse mode is that it allows the brains natural filling system to kick-in. That is: in the diffuse mode we can organise all the information and thought patters we've created in the focused mode and remember where they are for later.

So how does this apply to learning in real life?

We already know that when we're learning something new and concentrating that the brain is in focused mode.

When we're relaxing, sleeping, going for a walk etc we're in diffuse mode and it's this mode that's vital for organising all the information into our long term memory for later recall.

Therefore learning has 2 important phases: focused mode where we learn the new concept and diffuse mode where we organise that information for later recall and come up with new creative ideas.

Introduction to Learning Concepts

This blog post forms part of the Coursera Learning How To Learn peer assessment 2: Final Project on Learning.

The three main topics I'll be explaining in the upcoming blog posts are:

• Focus and Diffuse Modes of Thinking
• Procrastination
• Deliberate Practice

The aim of these posts is to educate you about these three topics of learning.