STUDY LESS, STUDY SMART

Telling people to study more does

notnecessarily help. In some cases it
might
actually worsen their performance.
Takingnotes, so vital but most students
who do
it haven't learned a very simple rule.The
first moment you get after a class
ideally right after the class, you shouldsit
down with your notes and expand on
everything you jotted down, give it
depthflesh it out, okay? If you even wait
to go
home and do it a couple hours later,
youwill have forgotten some of your own
notes. How do you know you know it? If
youcan look at it, go to the next one
read it and then stop and go back to
theone before, look up in the sky and in
your own words say what that was
about,yeah you know it. Now a lot of
students
don't realize how much we're controlledby
environmental cues. Get a little lamp
and it becomes your study lamp so if
 youhave to study in your bedroom, turn
on
the lamp and start studying. The
momentyou lose your edge, fifteen,
twenty, thirty
minutes laterturn the lamp off, get up and
leave the
desk. What you're training yourself -
tostudy while seated there and it becomes
increasingly automatic, as did theraising
of the hand.
You sit, turn the lamp on and you'reready
to go it's like magic. Your brain
has to be focused to be really studyingnot
time-sharing back and forth. The more
active you are in your learning, the
moreeffective and yet increasingly I have
students who think studying is readingit
over and over and they're gonna have
some magical thing where they
suddenlyunderstand it and remember it
well. First
you have to decide, what am i learning?
Isit a concept or a fact, okay?
Understanding the name of a bone is
afact, understanding what it does in the
body gets into a concept, okay? So
 instudying sometimes there are a lot of
facts, in fact I use Anatomy as a good
example. You
got to memorize bones, muscles,
organstissues a lot of it but if you simply
memorize and don't understand
thefunction of it, the comprehension of the
actual concepts it's a lot of wastedlearning
really, just to know a name of a
bone is like yeh so what? But in
mostcollege classes what we as professors
are most concerned about is that yougrasp
the concept because concepts once
grasped, will stay with you a lifetime.
Canyou put the concept in your own
words? If
you can't, you don't really understand
itokay, it's not meaningful to you. To
make
it meaningful is a struggle. It'sprobably
the biggest struggle you have
as a student but it's a struggle youneed to
do or you're wasting your study
time. People are incredible at
confusingrecognition with recollection.
Your
visual recognition threshold is so greatyou
 could see a person once, see them
years later and go 'I know you.'
You'vehighlighted the most important
stuff, you
now go back to study it and you say oh
Iremember it! So do you study it? No. So
what don't you learn? The most
importantpart of the chapter. Most of you
undo
good studying by not sleeping adequately.
We're not sure exactly how but
there'ssomething going on and it involves
the
hippocampus, it involves the storage
froma transitory long-term memory to a
permanent - what we call consolidation
butwe're getting increasing evidence that
that consolidation process is dependenton
rapid eye movement sleep which if
you're an adult happens about every
hourand a half once you fall asleep. If
you're not getting a good nighttypically
around eight hours, you're not
getting enough REM. What you've
studieddoesn't become permanent and I
can tell
you there are studies that show simplyby
 getting better rest, some students
improve markedly in their
performancebecause their brain now
stores it a lot
more efficiently. By the way if you
knowanybody with sleep apnea, biggest
thing
they'll tell you is I can't
rememberanything, my brain is shot. It's
like my
memories gone. Yeah, it is because
yourREM-ing isn't happening, because
you wake
up so often and you can't consolidateand
store permanent memories. Here's the
funny thing. There's no money to be
madeby telling people to get more sleep,
so
you don't hear about it on TV. Sylvan isn't
telling you to get better sleep
because they don't make any money. I
tellstudents and they go yeah that's nice
but they continue to use their time
forother things. It's kind of interesting
isn't it? The best advice, sleep betterand
most of you'll do better. Most of you
won't even begin to take it and I know
whyyou've got so many other things to do.
I'd
ask you this, are they important?
Isstudying and learning the most
important
thing you're doing is a student If somaybe
you need to give up some of the
other activities. I have students tell meI
don't have enough time. There's two-
what- 162 hours in a week? We all have
thesame amount of time. Marty has no
more
nor less than anybody in this room. The
realquestion is what do I do with my
hundred
and sixty two hours? What I want to do
isshow you graphically what I'm talking
about.Let's say this is efficient studying
and
I know there are no numbers there
buthigher means more efficient, lower
means
low or no efficiency and this axis
we'relooking at time. Here's what happens
for
the average student. For her, 6 o'clock
inthe evening after her supper at the
 residency dining hall, she ploppedherself
down at her little study area
and started studying but here's
whathappened. By about 6:30 she was in a
major slump but what was her goal?
Tostudy 6 hours so she continued to sit at
her little desk and stare at pages
untilmidnight. She was at her desk 6
hours, how
long did she actually study? About 20-
30minutes. Now there's a simple concept
in
psychology that all of you are aware
of.Things that are reinforced, we tend to
do
more of, things that are punished
orignored we tend to do less of. You know
we operate by those principles to alarge
degree. If you're sitting there for
six hours, are you feeling good? No.
Onceyou get here, you're looking at your
book
going I hate geography, I hate literatureI
hate psychology
all the things we're trying to get youto fall
in love with, you're hating it
and so her actual good studying
 wasfollowed by five and a half hours of
pain and misery. I would bet you, I
don'tknow for a fact, that as the quarter
progressed she sat down
and finally she was done before she
evenstarted. She sat down and just stared
at
a book and she flunked every class.
Themoment you start to slide, you're
shoveling against the tide. What you
needto do is what? Take a break. Here's
what's
cool about it. You can study for a
halfhour, it doesn't take a half hour break
to recharge your batteries. For
mostpeople, about five minutes and this is
where you go away, do something fun
forfive minutes and actually say this is my
treat for having studied for 30
minuteseffectively. Go back and here's
what
happens.Your efficiency is nearly a
hundred
percent. Study a half hour, take a
breakstudy a half hour, study a half hour,
now
had she done that over a course of
 sixhours she would have got about five
and
a half hours of serious studying andabout
a half hour of total break time.
SQRRR. Survey that's the S, question
that'sthe Q, then you have 3 R's - read
recite
review. So how do you do the survey?
Theseare not novels. In a novel you
wouldn't
want to read the last page, would
you?Find out who done it, it'd ruin the
whole
thingbut this is a textbook so what you do
is
you actually go through the entirechapter,
you look at pictures okay what's
this about appleswhat's this about a
duckbill platypus
okay and what you're doing as you
surveyyou ask questions. It only takes a
couple
of minutes to survey a chapter in anyclass.
As you're surveying you
simultaneously raise questions.
Whatyou're doing then is causing you to
be
looking for answers and this is apowerful
thing. How many of you have
noticed when you're looking through
anewspaper for a piece of information,
you
can find it, it kind of jumps out at youbut
if you're just kind of reading it
haphazardly, kind of casually, most
ofwhat you read you don't even
remember.
There's something about it and I
can'texplain it, I can only describe it. If
you
intend to find something, you find it
andI've got a little demonstration I could
have brought where I actually show
aplacard with the words Boston and
London
printed on them and I hold it up for
20seconds. Out of a group this size,
maybe
two or three of you would see Boston
andLondon because before I do it, I tell
you
to look for letters, symbols and numbers.I
create what's called a set. You're now
expecting not to see words but lettersand
 even though Boston and London are
printed on diagonal, most people don'tsee
it. Likewise if you just kind of go
through a book without asking
questionsfirst
you kind of skim over the content.
Youdon't have the search mechanism
going,
okay? The reading, followed by
therecitation, I talked about that.
Technically before a test it should
bereview.
It should be in the barn. Now you're
justtouching up to make sure you haven't
lost anything or confused anything but
Iknow how this works because we
schedule
tests, most students don't start
studyinguntil shortly before an exam and
much
like my friend, it puts so much time
allmassed together and only study for
about
a half hour, pull all-nighters so theydon't
get the good rest, come in and do
poorly. You're undoing yourself. If
youstart studying early and do some of the
 things I've talked about, by the time
youget to the test
you're just reviewing at that point, nottruly
studying.

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