5 keys to get the most out of the Feynman technique
1 message
Scott Young <newsletter@scotthyoung.com>
To: anindya <dj.anindya234@gmail.com>
Wed, Mar 27, 2024 at 23:13
​Read this article on my blog​
Hey anindya,
The most popular piece of studying advice I’ve ever come up with was the Feynman
Technique. While the technique itself is only loosely based on Richard Feynman’s practices,
the idea of self-explanations took of f and became a studying meme that has since gone
far beyond my own audience.
The basic idea for the technique is simple:
Pick an idea you don’t understand very well.On a blank sheet of paper, write an
explanation for the idea as if you are teaching it to someone else.Whenever you
get stuck, go back to the textbook to fill in the gaps in your understanding.
This technique was a staple of my studying during my MIT Challenge, and I still have
dozens of pages I wrote while trying to work through tricky concepts in math, physics
and programming.
That being said, there’s a lot of nuance in getting the technique right. Here are five tips
to make self-explanations work for you:
1. Apply the technique selectively.
The biggest complaint about the Feynman technique is that it takes too much time. A
course may cover a dozen or more concepts in a single lecture. Writing a couple pages of
explanation for each is incredibly time consuming.
Worse, the time spent building your abstract understanding of a concept is time not
spent learning to apply it. If you’re cutting out practice in favor of self-explanations, you
may end up worse of f!
Therefore, the first piece of advice I have is to apply it selectively. I tend to rely on selfexplanation when:
I cannot successfully apply a concept to the assigned practice questions,
The idea doesn’t make sense to me,
AND I know the idea is central to understanding the class.
My usual approach is to start with reviewing all the course material (lectures and texts)
and then to do relevant practice problems. Only when I hit an impasse that I believe is
owing to a conceptual misunderstanding does it make sense to invest the time to do a full
self-explanation.
2. Go tight for debugging confusion.
One reason to apply self-explanations is to repair a misunderstanding or fill in a gap in
your knowledge that’s causing confusion.
Unfortunately, figuring out precisely what you don’t understand is of ten half the battle.
Most of the time, we don’t have a good sense of what is confusing us; we’re simply
confused.
The value of self-explanation is that by trying to generate the explanation yourself, in
your own words, you’ll invariably hit an impasse at the weak link in your understanding.
Knowing where that impasse is, which link is weak, gives you the tools to go back to your
notes or textbooks, to do a close reading, or to articulate good questions you can ask
teachers or peers.
However, this only works if your explanation is tight enough. If you explain the concept to
yourself in broad terms, you might skip over the missing link in your reasoning. You can
easily convince yourself you understand something without identif ying or repairing the
missing step in your reasoning.
Thus, if you’re doing a self-explanation because of a struggle with a particular problem—
start by explaining that exact problem. If it was a confusing section of a lecture—
explain the confusing section of the lecture. Stepping back and tackling a generic concept
can skip over the very details you need to understand.
3. Focus on big ideas for memorability.
Another use for self-explanations is when you basically understand an idea, but the
reasoning feels dif ficult or a bit fuzzy. It feels like you don’t automatically “get” the idea,
and like you’ll probably forget it later.
One way to think about this is to imagine that the explanation consists of a bunch of
dif ferent individual facts, steps in reasoning, and mental simulations. Confusing
explanations are those where the linkages between various parts haven’t quite solidified
to the point where you can mentally traverse the idea with ease. By trying to generate
the explanation yourself, you reinforce the linkages between the factual propositions and
the steps of reasoning that make up the understanding.
Once you have the general gist of an understanding, generating analogies, diagrams or
examples can be helpful. These further associate the ideas in the explanation with
dif ferent, overlapping explanations, making them easier to retrieve and walk through in
the future.
4. Don’t substitute self-explanations for genuine practice problems.
Self-explanations can help you focus your attention, debug a particular missing link in
your understanding, or elaborate and retrieve knowledge to generate an understanding
of a higher-level concept.
However, it’s important not to substitute self-explanations for doing genuine practice.
There are two reasons for this:
– First, it’s hard to get the level of depth right for explanations. For hard classes, the
tendency is to do self-explanations that don’t go deep enough, thus skipping over
misunderstandings (even with deliberate ef fort to avoid this). Doing practice problems
helps you calibrate how deeply you need to understand an idea.
– Second, learning to identif y problem types and common solution steps or approaches
relies on dif ferent knowledge than generating an overall explanation does. Since the
knowledge needed to, say, explain Kirchhof f’s laws only partially overlaps with the
procedural knowledge needed to solve for the output of a circuit diagram, transfer from
one to the other will only be partial. Therefore, if the aim is to pass an exam, omitting
practice questions that resemble those on the test is unwise.
Self-explanations primarily help when:
1. You hit an impasse with your practice, owing to a confusion or misunderstanding.
2. Practice problems are limited or overly narrow. If the problems don’t cover the
full space of potential applications for an idea, developing a deeper representation
of the underlying concepts may be helpful.
5. Seek out alternative explanations to fill missing pieces.
Of ten, close reading and careful reasoning can fill gaps in misunderstanding without
resorting to new materials. Usually, the issue is simply that you missed an important step
in reasoning in the first pass, resulting in confusion.
However, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes a teacher assumes a crucial fact or step is
obvious and omits it from their explanation, even though it may be necessary for making
the correct inference. In other cases, an idea is alluded to, but if you haven’t mastered
that idea, the explanation as a whole doesn’t make sense to you.
Knowing where exactly the gaps are in your understanding makes it easy to seek new
explanations. Some good strategies include:
1. If the concept skipped over was a prerequisite you haven’t mastered, finding a
Khan Academy or online video that explains that concept may help.
2. If the reasoning between two steps isn’t clear, try finding another explanation
of the same concept. Dif ferent teachers will skip over dif ferent facts, so
coverage from multiple explanations is better than one.
While I haven’t used it as extensively myself, tools like ChatGPT also seem powerful in
this regard. Because you can copy and paste the text of what you’re trying to
understand and request a summary or explanation, LLMs may be able to of fer useful
explanations of steps you missed. Of course, as with all AI-based sof tware, there will
sometimes be hallucinations—but it’s generally easier to verif y whether a single missing
step of reasoning fits.
Teach to Learn
Although I don’t take nearly as many formal classes as I used to as a student, selfexplanations are still the bulk of my work—writing for a living requires me to make sense
of newly learned information so I can include it in my essays. As the saying goes, “Those
who know, do. Those who understand, teach.”
___
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