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How to Study for Exams - Spaced Repetition · Evidence-based revision tips

2018-04-09 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 26:22 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing

In the second video of his evidence-based revision series, Ali, a final-year Cambridge medical student, explains spaced repetition and the forgetting curve, argues for spacing recall even within one study session, and shows his colour-coded Google Sheets spaced-repetition spreadsheet, which he prefers to revision timetables.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Second video of the evidence-based revision series and the plan of the video

  • ★★ Ali's second video in his evidence-based revision tips series is about spaced repetition and how to apply it to your own study routine. — 00:00:00 · spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Ali calls active recall by far the most important way to make studying more efficient, and spaced repetition probably the second most important. (hedged) — 00:00:00 · active recall, spaced repetition

00:00:58 — What spaced repetition is: cramming, the forgetting curve and widening intervals

  • ★★ Ali describes spaced repetition as spreading the revision of a subject over time instead of cramming: crammed material sits in short-term memory and is forgotten within a day or two. — 00:00:58 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali says spaced repetition works because of the forgetting curve, known in psychology since the 1800s: over time we forget things at an exponential rate. — 00:01:36 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali says each review interrupts the forgetting curve, and after each interruption it takes longer to forget the material. — 00:02:05
  • ★★ Ali says spaced repetition lets the brain forget some information so that revising it takes brain power: the harder the brain works to retrieve it, the more strongly it is encoded. — 00:03:27 · spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Ali's example schedule for spaced repetition: study a topic today, then tomorrow, three days later, a week later and a month later, ideally by active recall rather than rereading. — 00:03:51 · spaced repetition, active recall

00:04:20 — Spacing within the same study session: the 2011 Swahili study

  • ★★ Ali describes a 2011 study of students learning Swahili words: those who spaced their repeated recall of each word within one session scored up to 80%, about 50% more than those who repeated recall at once with the same work. — 00:05:48 · spaced repetition, active recall
  • ★★★ Ali recommends spacing recall within the same day: after topics one and two, test yourself on topic one, about two hours later, before starting topic three. — 00:07:04 · spaced repetition, active recall
  • ★★ At the end of a study day Ali suggests asking yourself what you have learned: go over your active recall questions or write on one page, book closed, a spider diagram of all you remember of the subject. (hedged) — 00:08:08 · active recall

00:08:37 — Tips: Anki flashcards and a little practice each day

  • ★★★ Ali says he applied active recall and spaced repetition rigorously only in his second and third years at university, the two years he did really well in his Cambridge exams; in other years he drifted back to rereading and highlighting. — 00:08:37 · active recall, spaced repetition, University of Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali says his tips for applying spaced repetition rest on his own one-person experience, not a scientific study: viewers should try them and keep them if they work. — 00:09:09 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ For flashcards, Ali personally prefers the app Anki. — 00:09:09 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali used Anki to memorise facts such as anatomy and pharmacology, and quotes from John Paul II and St Augustine for his ethics essays, which examiners seemed to love. (hedged) — 00:09:38 · Anki
  • ★★★ Ali's mindset shift from spaced repetition: practise a little each day for a long time and you get really good at something; ten minutes a day for a week beats an hour or two at the weekend, as anyone learning an instrument knows. — 00:10:07 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali has applied little-each-day spaced practice to piano, guitar, graphic design, web design, video editing and coding alongside his academic work, and finds it gives much more improvement per unit of time. — 00:10:36 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Asked how he gets so much done, Ali says his secret is doing a little each day: being consistent has a staggering potential. — 00:11:05

00:11:35 — The magical spaced repetition spreadsheet system and scoping your subject

  • ★★ Ali used his spaced repetition spreadsheet in his second and third years and did really well in his exams; he is using it in his final year and hopes to do well again. (hedged) — 00:11:35 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali advises keeping the revision spreadsheet in Google Sheets rather than Excel: it loads easily and its phone app lets you update it anywhere, on the bus or in the library. — 00:11:35 · Microsoft Excel
  • ★★ In Ali's spaced repetition spreadsheet each subject gets its own sheet (biology, chemistry, physics at A-level; anatomy, physiology, pathology in medicine), with every topic of the subject listed down column A. — 00:12:10 · spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Ali says students should scope their subject: spend as long as it takes, even a whole day, listing every topic of the course, since few students know their course inside out. — 00:12:39 · scoping the subject
  • ★★ To list a subject's topics, Ali looks through past exam papers rather than the specification: you can't really trust the specification, but you can absolutely trust the past papers. — 00:13:28 · scoping the subject
  • ★★ Looking through all the BMAT past papers, Ali found that physics comes down to four categories: electricity, mechanics, nuclear and waves. — 00:13:28 · BMAT (exam)
  • ★★★ Each time Ali studies a topic and actively recalls it, he writes that day's date in the next column of the topic's row of his spreadsheet, building up a record of repetitions. — 00:13:57 · spaced repetition, active recall
  • ★★ For his third-year psychology exams Ali's spreadsheet listed the essays to learn for each of the three papers; once he had read an essay and drawn its spider diagram, he wrote the date. — 00:14:55
  • ★★★ Ali colour-codes each date box by how well he recalled the topic: green if he knew it very well, yellow if he knew about 50%, red if he did not know it at all. — 00:14:55
  • ★★ Ali says only recalling a topic earns a date in his spreadsheet: just rereading the textbook chapter or your notes is a total waste of time. — 00:15:54 · active recall

00:16:17 — Tips: start with what you don't know; the scattergun approach

  • ★★★ Ali's first tip for the spreadsheet system: start revising with the topics you don't know. — 00:16:19
  • ★★ Ali likes to start revising from the final topic of a textbook and work back to the first, especially with university lecture notes. — 00:16:48
  • ★★★ Ali takes a scattershot approach to his spreadsheet: each day he blitzes through as many topics as he can with active recall rather than spending ten hours on a single topic. — 00:17:47 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali links his scattergun approach to interleaved practice, a technique with some evidence in the literature: do a little of one thing and switch to something else before mastering it. (hedged) — 00:18:14 · interleaving

  • ★★★ Ali's buzzword for revision is "quantity rather than quality": getting through many topics matters more than covering a few in detail, because the active recall builds the connections in the brain. — 00:20:14 · active recall, interleaving

    “that's quite a good buzzword, quantity rather than quality”

00:21:09 — Why he doesn't like revision timetables

  • ★★★ Ali doesn't like revision timetables because they expect you to know in advance how much you need to revise each topic. — 00:21:11
  • ★★★ When Ali used to make revision timetables he repeated topics he didn't need to and gave too little time to ones he did, so he came to see revision as a fluid process. — 00:21:41
  • ★★ Each morning Ali checks his spreadsheet for the paper he is revising, does the red-marked essays first, then the yellows, then makes sure he still knows the greens. — 00:22:18
  • ★★★ Ali used to make revision timetables, but these days he never makes one: he uses his spreadsheet and decides each day what needs working on and what will make his brain work hardest. — 00:22:47 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali tells students who like timetables to keep them, but if a timetable isn't helping or they aren't sticking to it, as he didn't at secondary school, to try his spreadsheet method. — 00:22:47

00:23:23 — Summary of the video

  • ★★ Ali says his spreadsheet system is not based on evidence: no one has studied whether it works better than a revision timetable; it just works for him. — 00:24:54

00:25:22 — Thanks for subscribing and the videos coming next

  • ★ Ali says the channel has been growing fast in the past few days, since his previous revision video and his collaboration with Ibz Mo. (hedged) — 00:25:22 · Ibz Mo
  • ★★ Ali says more videos for students are coming: on motivation, productivity, how he makes notes though he doesn't like making notes, the apps on his phone and how he uses the iPad for medical school. — 00:25:22
  • ★ Ali says videos of his friends singing songs will be on the channel very soon. — 00:25:51

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Mentioned

Central: active recall · spaced repetition

Also: Anki · BMAT (exam) · CGP · Ibz Mo · interleaving · Microsoft Excel · scoping the subject · University of Cambridge

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