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How to Study for Exams - The STic Framework for Effective Learning

2019-06-16 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 13:47 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Evidence-based framing, Aimed at students, Lesson from a book, His medical past, Sponsor segment present

Ali introduces STic, his framework of four evidence-based study principles (spacing, testing, interleaving, categorising), drawing on David Epstein and Make It Stick: testing yourself matters most, even before learning a topic; spacing beats cramming; a "tree of knowledge" gives new facts a place; and learning should feel hard.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — The STic method: spacing, testing, interleaving and categorising; David Epstein and Make It Stick

  • ★★★ Ali's STic method names the four most important principles for studying or learning anything effectively: spacing, testing, interleaving and categorising; applying them makes studying a lot more efficient. — 00:00:00 · spaced repetition, active recall, interleaving

    “the STIC method for effective studying”

  • ★★ David Epstein (quoted): David Epstein says about five learning techniques are rigorously supported by research, and the three he focuses on in his chapter are testing, spacing and interleaving. — 00:00:29 · active recall, spaced repetition, interleaving

  • ★★ Ali says David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, looked at the evidence on learning for exams and sport and concludes, like the authors of Make It Stick, that spacing, testing and interleaving are the real game changers. — 00:00:58 · Make It Stick
  • ★★ Ali calls Make It Stick a really good book that every student should read. — 00:00:58 · Make It Stick
  • ★ Ali has pre-ordered David Epstein's new book Range, on how generalists triumph in a world of specialists, on Kindle. — 00:00:58 · Kindle

00:01:27 — Testing: active recall just means testing yourself, even before you learn a topic

  • ★★ Ali ranks the STic principles for himself in the order testing, spacing, categorising, interleaving, though it makes a less nice mnemonic. — 00:01:27

  • ★★★ Ali finds the term active recall confusing for students: it just means testing yourself, which he calls the single most important thing you can do to boost your exam scores. — 00:01:27 · active recall

    “Testing yourself is the single most important thing you can do to boost your exam scores”

  • ★★ Ali cites the authors of Make It Stick: when students unhappy with their exam results ask them for study tips, the usual answer is that they are not testing themselves enough. — 00:02:09 · Make It Stick, active recall

  • ★★ Ali says studies he cites in his active recall video show that testing yourself once is a lot better than rereading the same material four times. — 00:02:09 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali says many students wrongly think rereading notes, reading the textbook, highlighting or even taking notes is a useful way to study. — 00:02:09 · active recall
  • ★★★ To students who ask how they can test themselves before knowing the content, Ali says testing is integral to learning in the first place: you should test yourself even before you learn a topic for the first time. — 00:02:39 · active recall
  • ★★ David Epstein (quoted): David Epstein says to test people before they have had a chance to study, because it primes the brain to retain the answer when they then hear it, especially when they got it wrong. — 00:03:08 · active recall
  • ★★ David Epstein (quoted): Epstein describes the hypercorrection effect: if you are confident about an answer and turn out to be wrong, you are more likely to remember the right one when you get it. — 00:03:08
  • ★★ Ali says many studies show that testing yourself before, during and after studying a topic is probably the single best way to learn it. (hedged) — 00:03:08 · active recall

00:03:37 — Spacing: the forgetting curve, the Spanish vocabulary study, spacing versus cramming

  • ★★ David Epstein (quoted): David Epstein calls spacing "deliberate not practicing": leave space between bouts of practice of the same thing, because what matters is how long the progress stays. — 00:03:37 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali explains spaced repetition as spacing out study sessions so you have forgotten some of the material before you restudy it, and restudying it ideally means testing yourself on it. — 00:03:37 · spaced repetition, active recall
  • ★★ Ali explains the forgetting curve, a long-known finding of memory research, as the idea that memory decays over time, as when lecture material is gone a day or a week later. — 00:04:20 · forgetting curve
  • ★★ To students who forget lesson material the next day and think they are bad at learning, Ali says this is how memory works: classmates also need repeated sessions, and nobody just gets it first time. — 00:04:50 · forgetting curve
  • ★★ David Epstein (quoted): David Epstein describes a study in which the group whose vocabulary study was split a month apart remembered 250% more eight years later than the group that studied it in one day, with no studying in between. — 00:05:48 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali says the literature on effective studying reports nearly identical results: spacing study sessions is much more efficient than doing everything in one go, otherwise known as cramming. — 00:05:48 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ For a quick method to apply straight away, Ali points to his retrospective revision timetable, one of his favourite techniques for using spacing and testing to make studying as efficient as possible. — 00:06:24 · spaced repetition, active recall

00:06:50 — Categorising: building a tree of knowledge, the haematology example, scoping the subject

  • ★★★ Categorising is one of Ali's favourite study techniques: to learn large amounts of information, build a categorisation system or structure around it rather than just trying to learn the information. — 00:06:50
  • ★★ Ali is working on a proper long video on categorising as a study technique, covering the evidence. — 00:06:50
  • ★★ Ali says that in most studies comparing students told to memorise a list of words with students given or making categories for them, the categorisation group remembers far more, short and long term. — 00:07:19

  • ★★★ Ali calls the structure a "tree of knowledge": start with a main trunk and build branches off it, so every new piece of information can be hung on one of the branches. — 00:07:19

    “build what I like to call a tree of knowledge around our subject”

  • ★★ At medical school Ali found haematology overwhelming until he built a tree of knowledge for it from the syllabus and textbooks: anaemia, clotting and malignant haematology, each with its own subcategories. — 00:07:48

  • ★★ Since building his tree of knowledge for haematology, Ali understands the subject a lot better: he knows where each new condition fits, and the subject feels a lot less overwhelming. — 00:08:34
  • ★★★ Ali wishes he had built a tree of knowledge for every subject from day one of medical school, before even learning it, while scoping the subject: one or two hours with the syllabus would have let him hang new information on the tree rather than chuck it into a notebook. — 00:09:30 · scoping the subject

00:09:59 — Interleaving: mixed practice, and why learning should feel difficult

  • ★★ If a subject overwhelms you, Ali suggests thinking about it as a tree of knowledge, which he has found really helpful. — 00:09:59
  • ★★ David Epstein (quoted): David Epstein says that when children learn several types of maths problem, they are way better off with the types mixed together: they struggle more and take longer but learn better how to match a strategy to a type of problem. — 00:10:29 · interleaving
  • ★★★ Ali says the harder you have to work to retrieve information, the more strongly it is encoded, so learning should be difficult and mentally taxing. — 00:11:12 · active recall
  • ★★ Summarising notes from the textbook and highlighting feel really productive because they are easy to do, Ali says, and he has been guilty of it himself far too many times to count. — 00:11:12
  • ★★ Students shy away from the mental strain of testing themselves, thinking a hard task means they are doing it wrong; Ali says it is the opposite: finding learning hard means doing it right, finding it easy means not learning. — 00:11:41

00:12:10 — Skillshare sponsor read, his planned Skillshare classes and sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · David Epstein · interleaving · Make It Stick · spaced repetition · STic framework · tree of knowledge

Also: People: Thomas Frank

Projects: Skillshare classes

Works: Range · The Sports Gene

Organizations: Instagram

Concepts: forgetting curve · hypercorrection effect · scoping the subject

Products: Kindle

Only in the description or credits: Invest Like the Best

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