Maximizing Your Learning Potential with 6 Key Strategies

If you're a student, you've probably asked yourself, "What is the most effective way to learn?"

Unfortunately, most people waste their time doing ineffective things, so this is a wise question.

So, I asked a cognitive psychologist at The Learning Scientists for some tips.

Building on her research in learning science and absolute best-practice study skills, here are her top six strategies for tapping into your inner genius. The first strategy is called Spatial Practice. His 5 hours of learning packed into one intensive session is inferior to the same 5 hours he would have spread over 2 weeks.

Learn more and get better results in the same or less time. It's less stressful than cramming panic, and it also reduces future study time because you don't have to relearn the same information as you progress.

Plan and put a short study session on your calendar. This is not an intense learning phase like a marathon. Please check the information for each course after one day. After studying the last course, go back and study important old information to keep it up to date. Also, just rereading your notes won't help. Use other strategies in this video. Allow 2-3 days between study sessions on the same topic. The key is to have regular short study sessions over an extended period. Switch between ideas during a single learning session for a given class. This is called interleaving. Don't dwell too long on one idea, problem, or type of problem. This change highlights and contrasts similarities or differences between topic or question types.

Switching when solving a problem helps you choose the right approach to solving the problem. This strategy encourages making connections between ideas as you move between them. You want your mind to be agile and be able to easily switch between ideas and figure out how they are related. Research enough information to understand the idea before switching. You must find what works best for you. Don't switch too often instead of spending an entire session on one topic.

Try to make connections between ideas as you move between them. In the following lessons, changing the order in which you tackle the topics will help you understand more. Switching may feel harder than working on one topic for an extended period of time but remember. I want to use the most effective, not the easiest. The next strategy is when you have your textbook and notebook in front of you. Ask yourself how and why things work and find the answers in the lesson materials. Describe your ideas in as much detail as possible and connect them to your daily life and experiences. This forces us to understand and explain what we have learned and connect it to what we already know.

This will help you organize your new ideas and remember them later. Asking “how” and “why” questions helps us understand how ideas are similar or different. Start with your notebooks and textbooks and make a list of ideas you need to learn. Read through the list and ask yourself how and why these ideas work. Then, review the lesson materials to find answers to your own questions.

Connect different ideas and explain to yourself how they work together. The specific questions and how you deconstruct ideas will depend on what you are studying. It can be math, science, history, or something else entirely. See the instructions below this video for some examples. Use specific, concrete examples. Relevant examples help illustrate and explain your ideas and help you understand them better. Human memory is better tied to concrete information than to abstract information. So always look for examples that you can relate to. For example, "rarity" is an abstract concept. "The rarer something is, the more valuable it is." We used abstract terms to describe abstract ideas. Not very helpful. So let's illustrate the idea with a concrete example.

Think of a ticket scalper. Buy your tickets to sporting events early in the season for reasonable admission prices. But as game day approaches and both teams rise to the top of the leaderboards, more and more people are buying tickets. This shortage drives up ticket prices, and ticket retailers charge more for tickets. This is a concrete example of an abstract idea. You can collect examples from teachers and professors, search textbooks and notebooks, and find examples from everyday life. Thinking of relevant examples of yourself helps you learn the most. However, always check with your teacher that the examples are accurate and relevant to the ideas you are learning.

Connecting an idea with an example shows how the example applies. Combine verbal content with images. This gives you two options for understanding and remembering information later.

Look for visuals in your notebook or textbook and see how the words describe what the picture is about. Then do the opposite. How does the diagram represent what the text describes? Look at the pictures and explain their meaning in your own words. Then take the words as lesson material and draw your own pictures. Try presenting information in different ways and start using this strategy later when you practice recalling knowledge. Don't get me wrong, this is not about learning styles. Many studies have shown that assessing one's learning style and adapting one's learning approach to that style does not improve learning.

Just because you like photography better doesn't mean it's the most effective way to learn for you. A combination of words and pictures is the most effective way to learn. And finally, this is the most valuable learning skill that can help you improve your performance. So it's definitely worth mastering them. Practice recalling everything you already know about the topic on your mind. Put all your notes and textbooks aside and write or sketch whatever you happen to know. why? Searching for knowledge in this way cements what you learn and makes it easier to remember later. But improvement also takes practice. If you want to improve your information retrieval on the trial, you should practice information retrieval the same way you practice any other skill. It also emphasizes what you don't know, so you should focus your study time there.

Of course.

So, what's the best way to do this?

Take as many practice tests as possible, even if you have to trade practice tests with friends. Or start with a blank piece of paper and empty your head, write down everything you know, and draw a sketch or concept map that connects all your ideas.

Make sure you do this for a while after you learn something. So put your notes aside. This is not just reciting information from skimming a textbook. When you're done, check your writing against the class materials. What did you do right, what did you do wrong, and what did you never remember? This is perfect feedback and shows where we need to improve.

Scientific studies have found six learning strategies to be the most effective. Here's an easy way to pull them out for your next study session.