The Single Most Important Study Strategy You Will Ever Hear
September 10, 2007 9:40 pm College, Learning, ProductivityPlease thank Cal Newport for this guest post. I will be writing up a post at his blog, Study Hacks, very soon. Cal is also a successful author, with two books entitled: How to Become a Straight A Student, and How to Win at College.
A Surprising Discovery
To research my second book I devised a simple plan. I would choose 50 students, all of whom had high GPAs, from a variety of schools and majors. Each student would besubjected to a tedious interview that extracts every last littledetail about their study habits.
My assumption was that each student would have his or her own custom-built toolbox of tactics. I would pick and present those that seemed most interesting.
But my assumption was wrong.
As I began to collect and review my interview material I kept stumbling across pieces of advice or strategies that appeared again and again. Even more unexpected, many of these repeat offenders were strategies I too had devised as part of my own academic turn around. I soon developed an astonishing theory: When it comes to making straight A’s, there seem to be a collection of universal laws— common strategies that almost any student who sets out to improve his or her performance will ultimately stumble upon. Like the laws of nature, they are fundamental.
One of the most prevalent of these straight-A laws, and arguably the most important, is the following:
The Quiz-and-Recall Method
Most students study using rote review. The method is simple. Collect all of your notes from both lecture and reading assignments, then read them silently to yourself, again and again, as many times as you can tolerate before you become overwhelmed by fatigue.
Conscientious students start a day or two in advance and are able to review everything several times. Less conscientious students wait until the night before — and are often still rote reviewing up to the literal last minute before the test. Indeed, the word “cram” can be defined as: “rapid rote reviewing.”
The straight-A students I interviewed did not do rote review.
In fact, they despised rote review because they could correctly identify its inefficiency. As any cognitive scientist will tell you, silent reading is a terrible way to retain material. Your mind wanders and the material is retained at an abysmally low rate.
Here is what straight-A students do instead:
- They collapsed their notes into clusters which I call big ideas. It doesn’t really matter how they decide this grouping, it’s enough that clusters are somewhat consistent.
- They assigned a one-sentence prompt for each big idea. For example: How do Gibbon’s ideas contrast with the scholars of the early 20th century?
- For each prompt, they attempt to lecture out loud, as if talking to an imaginary class, the main points from the corresponding big idea. They do this without looking at their notes. If they are successful, they move on. If they had trouble, they put a checkmark next to the big idea.
- After the first pass, they take a break, and then repeat, only focusing on the big ideas that got checkmarks. After this run-through, they repeat again, focusing only on the big ideas that still gave them trouble in the second pass. And so on.
- This continues until they finish a pass with no checkmarks.
I call this the quiz-and-recall method. And it’s incredibly effective.
Two things to notice:
First, for some reason, lecturing out loud makes concepts stick in your mind. Once you explain an idea, it has a way of intertwining itself in your neural pathways, and refusing to let go. Once is enough— you’re going to remember that material. The same doesn’t hold true for rote review. You can read over a set of notes 10 times and still forget the important ideas by the next morning.
Second, by only focusing, on each pass, on the big ideas that gave you trouble in the previous pass, you’re eliminating wasted time. Ideas you are familiar with get a minimum of time. Tough ideas get the most time. In essence, you minimizing the time required to learn every last idea.
It’s Like Magic
Students who trust the quiz-and-recall method report that its effectiveness is almost eerie. A common experience for me, using this technique, is to sit down for an essay exam and find myself able to remember, almost word for word, arguments from lecture that I ingrained using q-and-r. Needless to say, the resulting essays (and grades) were strong.
This is a simple change. But it’s devastatingly effective. If you change just one thing about how you study, consider making the crucial switch from rote review to quiz-and-recall.
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October 3rd, 2007 at 7:06 am
[...] is based on the tested techniques behind the Straight-A method. (That is, it relies heavily on the quiz-and-recall review structure). Note, this system tackles non-technical courses. It should be easy, however, to [...]
July 21st, 2008 at 8:55 pm
My problem with rote review was always one of context; namely, rote review has no context. It’s like trying to study a dictionary–it quickly becomes a jumble of disconnected facts. I learned to quiz and recall early on, and I set up my notes to facilitate it by taking notes in an outline style (”collapsing notes into consistent clusters” I believe was how it was phrased earlier). Often, just the note-taking itself was enough for my recall, because it forced me to make comparisons and associations as I took notes, rather than just mindless stenography. I always had high marks in school (high school valedictorian), and I didn’t have to spend time freaking out about not remembering lots of little facts.
July 21st, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Hey, this is great. Thanks for posting something actually useful!
July 22nd, 2008 at 2:37 pm
I’ve always done adequately in school be it high school or college course work, but I rote review… typically only just before class (enough to get two readings of the material in however long that takes) and still get straight A’s on all the tests I take. My problem with school work has always been homework, unless its a massive part of my grade I just refuse to do it. It’s usually just busy work that is a waste of my time. Our entire current schooling system needs an overhaul.
July 22nd, 2008 at 2:49 pm
It isn’t the talking out loud, its that they reorganize the data from written notes to spoken words. In order to translate any data from one medium to another you have to a) understand it and b) *consciously* review it.
I used a similar technique, but would instead re-organize my notes into a different, but still logical sequence. (e.g. events by person instead of chronological)
July 28th, 2008 at 5:36 am
I could not more enthusiastically agree with this article. Due to devastating family tragedy, my siblings and I were left with virtually no academic guidance from very early ages. All of us tested as intellectually well above average, yet our academic performance was poor to average, based on our grades. “Works well below potential,” and “Seems frustrated and distracted.” were the typical types of comments on report cards. Of course you become frustrated, distracted, and work below potential when you have no idea how to study and are even taught by your teachers to silently read endlessly to yourself complex and abstract thoughts and ideas. *If you don’t already have a predisposition to inactivity and introversion, this lack of an approach is catastrophically destructive*. The vast amount of hours required to retain information by such an inefficient and unrefined method is mind-numbing. Mind-paralyzing.
I became an actor fifteen years ago. It was something that I decided I would devote the rest of my life to mastering. As I attained more and more training, it was clear that I was running into this same old problem again and again, yet this time the amount of information that must be retained, word-for-word, dwarfed by comparison the amount of information on the average college exam. One average day of shooting for a typical feature film may require up to twenty-five pages of verbatim text. The remarkable thing is, even most actors have no idea how to retain, and accomplish this by sheer volume and frantic effort.
One day I made the casual comment to an actress that I was working with that script learning was tdeious to me and a source of stress to the point of completely distracting me from actually working on the life of the characters. Just knowing the lines took up all of my time and there was simply none left to give them life. What she showed me in ten minutes changed my professional and even personal life, by its effect.
Starting at the first line, she asked me to literally guess what my character might say. After I arrogantly dismissed this as childish, I did as she asked and we then consulted the script. Of course I had been wrong, so I adjusted/corrected what I had said, read the next line from the other character, my cue (Or the next ‘question’ as you would find on any test), and again formulated a response. Wrong again, but I corrected and moved on. Within ten minutes, I was at the end of the page. She read back to me the other character’s lines and I responded with more certainly that I had ever had before. I am not ashamed at all to say that I wept. I had just done what would have before taken me hours to accomplish in the time it took to finish a Diet Coke.
My personal goal is to finish my graduate studies and teach college in my retirement. This simple tool which essentially breaks down similarly to the Quiz and Recall observation described here has made this not only possible but literally enjoyable. I am forever in her debt. I encourage any young, or older, student of any type to give this article VERY serious consideration.
James
August 6th, 2008 at 6:42 am
Nice article.
Will definitely try this method out when the next exams are on.