How to study Introduction Firstly, I want to say that I am a student from the UK, so this guide will be slightly biased towards exams I am taking currently; the GCSEs. In terms of bias, it’s just me using examples that would fit my specification or subjects, such as science: cell biology. However in my opinion, this guide is useful for any type of learning, it’s just not tailored specifically for any one subject because that wasn’t my purpose. ⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻ Key terminology Before diving into this guide, you need to understand some key terminology such as Passive learning This is when you listen to someone or something, and internalise the information. For example, lectures can be a form of passive learning. So can your teacher standing at the front of the classroom, relaying information to you. Active learning Active learning simply means you participate in your learning. For example, you answer questions about a topic you were introduced to. This means that you are actively engaged with your learning, you are not passively ‘absorbing’ the information. Active recall Mentally retrieving information. For example, you have a flashcard with a question on one side, and the answer on the other. You look at the question and try to come up with the answer mentally. Once you have a mental answer, flip the card over. You have just completed active recall. Spaced repetition Nice and simple, all it is, is spacing out your revision in a way that is effective. This changes, so you might revisit a topic after one day, then 4, a week and so on. ‘Repetition’ part of this phrase just means active recall or something similar. ⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻ What do you do to learn a topic? Getting straight into the guide, firstly I want to lay out a step by step system. This isn’t a strict ‘plan’ you follow to study, it’s one that you should keep in mind. For example, don’t remember without understanding first. With that being said, here are the 2 steps to studying/learning a topic. Understanding Self explanatory, you want to understand the topic first. This can be done in a variety of ways, and is kind of subjective. However, there are some techniques to use. Namely, the Feynman technique. What this means is when you explain the topic to a ‘5 year old’ without using specialist terminology. If you can’t explain a concept well enough, you simply refer back to the source of your learning and try to sum it up before explaining again. Remembering Similar to understanding, this is self explanatory. You have to remember a topic in order to learn it, otherwise there’s no use understanding it once. This is where active recall and spaced repetition come into play. You can combine active recall and spaced repetition to equal a spaced repetition system (SRS). There are apps that do this, the popular one being anki. The reason this works so well for remembering is because it combines two key concepts in remembering, active recall and spaced repetition. It’s usually in the form of a flashcard. However, anki can take a while to learn, since it is quite complicated. Despite that, the end result is amazing, from learning formulae in maths, to organelle in science, it’s an amazing tool to use. Researching how to use it and mastering Anki can help optimise your studies a lot. ⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻ How can I implement these steps in my studies? Understanding - implementation Let’s give an example topic and some steps you might take to understand and remember the topic. The topic I’ll use as an example is cell biology. Firstly, understanding. I could use a revision guide to read about the topic. I’ll do a broad read of the topic and make a framework of cell biology. For example, the organelle of an animal cell or a plant cell. Cell types could be another bullet point. The objective of framework for a topic is to get a broad view. An analogy could be thought of; ‘as the forest from the trees’. ‘The forest’ is all of the topic and I’m trying to find out how big the forest is which helps me visualise how much I need to know. Framework is very important in my opinion, as it helps to understand the whole topic. It also helps you create to do tasks that are achievable. Furthermore, actually understanding the ‘trees’ (the facts/actual content of the topic) could be achieved by reading the topic, and making your own questions. These questions shouldn’t have answers, but instead you should just answer them mentally: if you really like you could physically write them but it may be quite tedious. For example, I could create 5 questions on the parts of a cell: What are the organelle of an animal cell? What organelle are only found in a plant cell? What is the function of mitochondria in a cell? How do cells function? Why do cells need a cell membrane? I would mentally answer these questions, and use my revision guide on cell biology to see if I got the answers right. The reason I do this instead of taking notes is because summarising from a textbook isn’t the best form of studying. This is because it doesn’t require any mental effort, whereas active recall does, which is what practice questions do. Therefore, making practice questions and answering them can help understand a topic by incorporating active recall, which is proven to be effective for studying/learning. Another form of understanding could be the Feynman technique, which was discussed earlier in this guide. This can be especially effective in topics where you would need to explain your point of view or debate. Topics such as Religious studies, Citizenship, or even English literature can benefit widely from this technique as it helps create quick thinking which is crucial for exams. It also benefits your understanding because you can find out quickly if you don’t know a topic well when you cannot explain it properly. Remembering - implementation After understanding a topic, you must remember it. Otherwise you won’t remember come exam time, which makes it pointless to understand as I said before. This step should be done only after understanding, otherwise you won’t have a full understanding of the topic and you’ll have more flashcards to make, since you don’t understand it well enough. I use anki to make flashcards, which will ‘set’ me the cards at a later day once I study them. Studying simply just means remembering what is on the other side of the flashcard. This is one type of flashcard, the basic which is just a question or a concept on the front, then the answer on the back. Anyways, an example of making a flashcard would be the question; ‘What is the function of mitochondria in a cell?’. The answer would be ‘Respiration occurs within mitochondria with the use of enzymes which releases energy for the cell to function’. So if I want to learn this flashcard, I would have to remember the answer when I ‘study’ the flashcard. If I get it correct, anki will ‘set’ me the card at a later date, and the date would be increasingly further away since I would remember the information. This is extremely helpful for remembering facts, because it includes active recall and spaced repetition, so you won’t forget topics after remembering them. Despite this, anki can only help you remember the ‘trees’ and not the ‘forest’. Therefore it is crucial to also complete exam questions or questions made by a verifiable source, that enables you to use information from your flashcards and utilise it in a way that you would have to in an exam. Exam questions can be thought of as building the ‘forest’ which is all of the topic. In conclusion, using anki and exam questions helps you remember topics. This is because they all include essential concepts to remembering. ⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻ Additional information Retrospective timetable The definition of retrospective just means looking back on the past. The reason why this is used as a timetable is because it is more easier to follow than a traditional timetable, which is very strict. An example of a traditional timetable would be: You may be thinking, why is this bad? Well, it’s very strict firstly, because if you have something that doesn’t let you complete the first square in a day, it discourages you from completing the rest of the squares. Additionally, it’s not very specific and just says a certain subject. Furthermore, it’s essentially looking into the future, which I’m sure you’ll agree, is quite hard to predict. Whereas, a retrospective timetable would look like: Why is this easier to follow than a traditional timetable? It’s because this timetable looks on the past, rather than the future. For example, in the picture above we can see that whoever made this timetable revised more of differentiation than numerical methods, because they graded the topic red in differentiation (red means they didn’t understand) whereas they graded numerical methods green, so they didn’t revise much because they already knew it. This timetable is better because you can look at your weaknesses and revise based on that. In addition, you can use this timetable to decide what you want to revise, making it more specific and easier to follow since you’re not following a strict schedule.
