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Chris Tan
Head Coach, SOE
Are you using scientifically-proven active methods to study?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines study as the devotion of time and attention to acquiring knowledge, especially from books. Another of its definitions for study states that it is a detailed investigation and analysis of a subject or situation. So, what is your definition?
Nobody ever really taught you how to study and strangely, it is not imparted in schools. Many students with one-track minds still stick to their intuitive methods that they first successfully used in primary school, even though those had already become ineffective and outdated. This is largely due to the fact that those methods are the only ways to study that they know of.
If you can put in like an inhuman 50 hours of revision per week on top of your school time, you had better be the ultimate scholar of the year. Else your current study method is clearly a waste of time.
Studying more by brute force does not yield better results all the time. The supposition of studying has never been to do it longer than your competitors anyway. Our study methods desperately need to be upgraded as we progress through more advanced education levels and the said curriculum obviously becomes more difficult to grasp and requires more time and effort to absorb. Cutting-edge study principles like Active Recall and Spaced Repetition, which have scientifically-proven to improve students’ test scores, remain largely unknown and unused.
Active Recall is basically a principle that you have to test yourself in order to really retain information. It is an effective revision strategy that helps consolidate long-term memory by extracting information from your brain, rather than by inertly feeding information into it.
Studies have shown that it is more important to retrieve or recall information from our brains, rather than to input information to them. As such, in order for us to do well in our studies and our examinations, we need more of the recalling information variety than the recognising information one. Think about it. There is little merit in being able to recognise the information and being unable to recall it when you need it.
Spaced Repetition is the repeated spacing of those tests at increasing intervals over time. This is yet another scientifically-proven method, which is still relatively unknown to many students.
Active Recalls of the information learned is performed at increasing time intervals to interrupt our “Forgetting Curves” – it is inevitable that we forget information over time. The more recalls that we do, the slower our rate of information decay becomes. There will be better results if fewer recalls are spaced over a longer period of time than when more recalls are spaced out over a shorter period of time. This infers that the more times we do this and the more spaced out the repetitions are, the higher the chance that we can turn this into a long-term memory. For example, if a student is taught the multiplication tables of 4 today, he or she should be made to “Active Recall” the same material perhaps on the next day, three days later and seven days later, to help improve retention
Even if you have been scoring well, bear in mind that education is a lifelong process. You need to aggressively seek out more effective study strategies that can help you lessen your time and effort spent on the comprehension of things that you wish to learn. You need to study more efficiently so that you can divert your free time to the other things in your life. There are surely other activities and commitments that you will be engaged in. Like they say, all work no play makes Jack a dull boy. Perhaps you want to go out to party. Perhaps you just wish to sleep more. Perhaps you like to exercise or play some sport.
Whatever it is that you want to do, you need to learn how to learn – this is probably the most important life skill that you can acquire. Even if you improved by only 1% every single day, which does not seem much, you would have compounded the effect to be 37.783 times better in 365 days’ time. Once you do manage to successfully upgrade your process of studying to become faster, more efficient and more productive, your scores will automatically be upgraded as well. Until then, you are doomed to study harder in your hit-or-miss attempts to achieve good grades. 😊
