Eesti
After reading the book ‘Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning’ I decided to share what I’ve learned about studying. I’m going to be talking about some tips that can improve the ways that you study and tell you why this book is valuable to read.
The book is available at the EBS library as well and you can borrow it.
- Testing yourself
This method is a very simple but is an effective study method, and you can practice it formally or informally as you wish. For instance, instead of just taking notes on what lecturers are saying, try to translate what they’re saying into questions, and then go back and answer those questions. Answer them later that day or the next week or in a month. So you can quiz yourself. It is also a good idea if you search on the internet and find tests as well as some questions provided by your instructor or in the back of chapters of some books. In fact, studies have shown, that doing practice problems is a more effective way to learn something than is just reading the material. So instead of wasting your time to merely reading material, spend that time doing tests and doing practice quizzes. If you ask yourself the questions and look for the answers before you even try to learn the topic, you’ll actually learn it better. This entire learning program structured around this idea like Duolingo, Memris, and so on which have helped you learn a lot of languages.
- Interleaving: mix up your practice
This idea says that if you have for example four topics to learn, you might think that it would be most effective to study one topic at a time, and once you’ve understood the one topic, move on to the next. Once you’ve understood the second topic move on to the third, and so on. According to some scientific studies, which is mentioned in the book, if you change the topics after 2 hours, it’ll be more effective and it can help you learn the subjects as best as you can. In addition, try to study all your four topics every day, and forget about studying one topic each day.
- Embrace difficulties: Struggle
If you’re going to teach a difficult concept to for example two groups of people, then before doing that, you tell one of those groups that the concept which they’re supposed to learn may be challenging to them, they will actually learn more. The group who thinks it’s easy, learns less. So think about challenges as a teacher not as a barrier.
Editor: Liisa-Maria Lillepea
