Check out a conversation between Justin and I on this video here: th-cam.com/video/5cbQudbxHi4/w-d-xo.html. Fair warning: it's a bit lengthier and more technical.
@@tolkienfan1972 I am a grammarian, and objective case rules still apply wherever I have taught, I teach, and wherever I have worked as a writer. 😉 In thanks for your video, this is my free study tip for you! 😊
I have ADHD and have never been able to use flash cards for memorization. What I do for things that I need to memorize is to rewrite them as a children's book (with pictures and all). You need to know the material very well to be able to explain it in a way a child can understand. The thing is that I can just jump right into it and I will research as I go to fill in any blanks in the information. By the time it's done, I know the information inside and out.
I'm high functioning/asperger's and that's the only way I know how to master anything I learn. Thing is, it can be very time consuming. Especially, if you're in a STEAM major.
@@akhilmenoj8767 sure, whatever you're interested in, read it and highlight the most important information and/or examples. Rewrite those notes in a notebook and read it. In short, the material is in a language, grammar and structure I can better learn and understand. This method for most is very rote and potentially time consuming. Especially if you're studying STEAM related subjects where one chapter can easily be over 60 pages long.
The fact that hundreds of people can converse and contribute to this conversation (i.e they watched both of those videos) are simply amazing. A lot of people are learning how to study more effectively
What I liked about this video is that you didn't put all Justin's ideas in the trash. You talked to Justin's ideas and used them together with yours! I liked it very much
I speak 3 foreign languages-French, Spanish, and Japanese-and therefore have spent a lot of time memorizing things. In my opinion, focusing on efficacy alone is one of the most toxic conversations common among learners, particularly autodidacts. It’s a bit like running the 100m dash in preparation for winning the Boston marathon. Yeah, it’s more helpful than doing nothing, but you don’t win a marathon by sprinting. Nor even by running. You win a marathon by not stopping. Similarly, the best methods are the ones that are feasible. Conversation may be more effective than flash cards, but it’s much less accessible. Indeed, the difficulty of finding a language partner, and the limited time you can spend practicing with them, often outweighs the advantages of having one. Moreover, conversations require a certain baseline knowledge that cannot itself be achieved through conversation alone. That baseline is easier to achieve through memorization not because memorization is better but because it’s infinitely faster and more accommodating. There are ways to engage with memorization beyond just abstractions floating in the ether and anchored to a flash card only by a word and its definition. When memorizing kanji, for example, it’s useful to look at each component and focus on the parts that constitute the whole. Sometimes they’re meaningful, other times arbitrary, but the process of association unto itself makes the abstract more concrete. Does that mean that learning process ceases to be excruciating? To the degree that wearing a t-shirt in the freezing cold is better than going shirtless, yes. But you’re still going to suffer. There’s a saying among artists: embrace the suck. Ultimately, your capacity to cope with that suck matters far more than your efforts to reduce it.
If there is a single domain where rota learning is the best method - probably language learning is the one. But have to be applied to learning full sentences (and properly translated-not by Google translator).
Very sensible take. IMO it's also important to point out that the actual learning happens when you see a word in different contexts "in the wild", not while doing flashcards. However, flashcards can be immensely useful for recognizing that word in the first place.
Yeah people think studying methods are magic or they can learn a language in a month. Truth is you'll have to sit down and do a lot of boring memorization.
@@vaxrvaxr I think that's true overall, and a good point. In fact, one-for-one meaning is more or less nonexistent between languages, aside from close neighbors. On the other hand, there are also things that just suck and nothing helps, such as conjugations, articles, genders, irregulars, or even spelling to some extent. It's that kind of stuff that really discourages people who thought they could do this without having to memorize stuff. But the truth is we memorize material even in our native languages, such as writing systems or vocabulary. No on is truly safe from the grind.
Ah thanks! I'm actually just learning Japanese and was looking to how encoding and SRS would play into it. Right, so Anki would be easier than encoding, but would getting a language learning partner be a bad idea in general?
You put your finger on it! I was puzzled by Justin’s very simple and narrow definition of active recall, whereas in reality the study strategy he advocates for is precisely what active recall is supposed to be. He has a point though because there definitely are people who are under the impression that they’re practicing active recall while all they actually do is use flash cards to train their memorization skills. So, admittedly, the confusion stems from the imprecise naming of the concept. It would be better to call it something like “encoding-optimizing recall” that’s harder to oversimplify.
I stumbled on Justin' Sung then shortly thereafter stumbled on you Benjamin Keep. You are both very helpful and is what I need to improve my reading speed and comprehending then encode and recall information.
As mentioned in the comments, this is taught very early in Justin Sung course. The method consist in encoding the information well and then having a spacing interleaving retrieval to prevent forgetting and learn further. It would be great to have a video of you and Justin together, or maybe a discord to discuss some ideas further. Thank you for producing good content :)
@Aakanksha Desai thanks for the reply Aakansha, just being curious, does he mention anything like after 1 days then a week, then a month sort of stuff in his course. Or is it more about the time elapse doesn't matter.
By YouSum Live 00:00:00 Retrieval vs. Encoding study techniques comparison. 00:01:03 Importance of effective encoding and retrieval in learning. 00:02:41 Critique of spaced repetition and flashcard-based systems. 00:05:40 Desirable difficulties for durable and flexible learning. 00:07:12 Synthesizing, reorganizing, and applying ideas for effective learning. 00:08:21 Effective retrieval practice involves higher-level thinking skills. 00:09:02 Applying knowledge in new contexts enhances retrieval effectiveness. 00:09:33 Free recall as a baseline for understanding and flexible usage. 00:10:08 Retrieval practice surpasses concept mapping in effectiveness. 00:11:08 Encouragement of both encoding and retrieval for optimal learning. By YouSum Live
Thrilled that this popped up in my recommended. I love the precision and nuance of how you explain learning science, and I like how you talk about Justin without any drama or fuss. Subscribed.
My favorite learning method these days is throwing my ideas out to chat GPT about how I think something I learned connects to something else or applies. Or just start having a conversation asking it for more context. The conversation does a great job helping things sink in.
@@krishanSharma.69.69f I just sort of think out loud or ask it to define something then dig in to ask it to explain the parts I didn't understand. (Just whittle down the definition until it's explained everything you don't get). And then I'll respond with things like, while talking with it about the As-a-service products that are coming up and everything as a subscription that there was a sort of parallel to Adam Smith's example of division of labor creating a coat. You simply have a conversation full of wonderings and observations that you might not feel free to waste the time of a human being with.
@cindystokes8347 😄 That's actually fun. It's like asking stupid question as a little kid to one's father but in this case the ai gives correct answers.
@@krishanSharma.69.69f The AI does not give correct answers unfortunately. ChatGPT is a language model; it reconstructs language to be as convincing as possible to an interpreter. This includes telling lies, giving fake quotes, etc. Using ChatGPT to learn is a bad strategy because of this. While it may get general things correct (although even this isn't ensured) it will almost certainly get nuanced issues and details incorrect.
Flashcards work well enough for me to get good exam results but if you want to get into a deeper level of understanding I think they won’t work. For something like Maths, remembering your thought process when you attempted a similar maths problem is helpful. Good insight btw I’m going to use the retrieval components from now!
Flashcards are an excellent way to first learn vocabulary in a foreign language. They are fast and efficient. The deeper encoding comes later from using the words when you speak, read, and write, and when you listen to others.
They are also useful for other things, in fact: they are useful for most things. Flashcards can be useful if instead of putting isolated facts in put things like "read this paragraph" or "do this exercise". Flashcards are NOT only for isolated facts, but is often used to memorize isolated facts. You can even put "explain what a coholomogy group is" on a flashcard and test your ability to explain it whenever that card comes up. People have even been using Anki for scheduling when they should practice with their dog to do a particular trick. What you are describing is just a misuse/misunderstanding on how to use flashcards effectively. Anki is just a scheduler. You can put whatever you want on a flashcard, including more abstract tasks. For mathematical proofs, you can split them up into various flashcards and isolate important steps. You can also just have a flashcard "do the proof of the mean value theorem". There is nothing with with flashcards.
Thank you for mentioning language. I watch Justin's videos, but he doesn't mention language as much as other subjects. When you are a beginner in a language, it is difficult to keep going to the next order in the pyramid. There isn't a lot of prior knowledge, especially when the target language is quite different from your native language ie English vs Korean lol
Justin's right - the theory of learning is complex. But then you have to boil it down to something that's teachable and workable in practice. I've been playing with these ideas for over half a century, and for me what works is: 1) Encoding using mind maps focused on answering an explicit question - eg Why was Britain the first country to industrialise? Answering questions forces higher level thinking rather than just parroting your source. 2) Using spaced repetition algos to schedule review of the mind maps 3) Re-creating the mind map from memory to answer the same question or a related question that synthesises related maps - eg What was the role of the Royal Navy in driving the Industrial Revolution? I evolved this back in the '70s during my undergraduate economics course at Cambridge - rated one of the best and toughest in the world. I got a 1st Class Degree working 9-5, 5 days per week. Many of my classmates, who were far more academically gifted than me, worked themselves to exhaustion for a poorer result. But they were studying hard, not smart...
This is great advice. For anyone else reading, note how during part (3) Tullochgorum suggests answering a different question than they did in part (1). This is ideally what you want to be doing. It's kind of like how physical therapists will work on stability by pushing your limb randomly in different directions. You're taking the material and molding it to answer different kinds of questions.
Super Short summary of the video Encoding & Retrieval are both integral and important parts of effective studying or learning. We need to do both. Surprisingly according to a research, Retrieval in any form is usually more effective than Encoding in terms of applying or Retaining information as Knowledge. In other words, Doing effective Practice of the Skill matters a lot. or Tests. In this case, Studying to Learn with a target of getting good grades in an Examination is an act of applying the information or knowledge. So the most effective way of practicing is in the most similar way or format to how examinations will occur. It's like a sport. Practice your sport in the most realistic game time scenarios as often as possible.
I'm working on some videos that will address this, kind of like this one (th-cam.com/video/WRjsOU6mOp4/w-d-xo.html) but for learning concepts/ideas from books.
well justin did a good way to explain this idea. The way through a step by step walkthrough about how one studies is simply not the best case scenario because with one concept there are numerous possibilities of existing walkthrough (imagine a ball in a big room and the number of possibilities of that ball existing anywhere), it's really about the principle behind those concepts that really matters which you can use to tweak your preexisting concept or habit or your own walkthrough
Great video! It would be awesome if you also detailed your journey through law school-what were your study techniques, how they evolved over time, and how you would've studied in law school if you were given a chance to start all over again now that you have the tools from being a cognitive scientist. It would be an insightful watch!
That would be very interesting! There's not a lot of videos like this on youtube, infact I can only think of Justin and two other people on youtube even talking about this at all.
Holy crap, this video is super valuable and your replies to other commenters' questions are an absolute gold mine of not just insight but also compassion. I like your style. New sub here for sure! Thank you for investing so much time and effort into sharing your knowledge!
In the retrieval phase of learning the biggest and only thing that I take into account is your advice of "study in a way of how you want to apply it/test it". Flashcards are useful but not for everything, in learning vocabulary and concepts they can be but not for the rest. Doing practice questions, your method of free recall are other good examples of information retrieval on a more context based studying.
I disagree. Flashcards can be useful if instead of putting isolated facts in put things like "read this paragraph" or "do this exercise". Flashcards are NOT only for isolated facts, but is often used to memorize isolated facts. You can even put "explain what a coholomogy group is" on a flashcard and test your ability to explain it whenever that card comes up. People have even been using Anki for scheduling when they should practice with their dog to do a particular trick. What you are describing is just a misuse/misunderstanding on how to use flashcards effectively. Anki is just a scheduler. You can put whatever you want on a flashcard, including more abstract tasks.
I think what you're saying and what Justin's saying give me a much better idea of why I've had such poor results from most attempts at SRS for learning Japanese, and also why my experience with the Jalup flash card decks has been so much more successful than the rest of the SRS-based techniques I've tried. Combining SRS with reading (and not just reading the throw-away sentences on the front of the cards, but also the explanations on the back that I need to understand the new item) in the language seems consistent with what you're saying.
I'm on the other side of Japanese learning (11 years in-country after arriving with zero knowledge). I'm not sure where you are in your study journey, but in case it helps anyone else: SRS for base vocabulary (in Japanese, maybe 1000-3000 words, and the 2100-ish joyo kanji), as long as it's interspersed with high levels of input (listening and reading). A good resource is Kanji in Context, a reference for those joyo kanji. Biggest advice: don't avoid kanji for "later," and don't focus on grammar rules beyond a few basics. Language construction and rules or "whys" are helpful for linguists, not really helpful for those of us learning to use the language. As we all know of our first languages, they're systems of convention, without deliberate design. So often asking "why?" boils down to "because a lot of people say it that way."
Huge respect for you 🙏 Seing the thumbnail and title , i thought you are going to criticize Justine Sung😃 But you appreciated it and also adviced many to go through his videos. Thanks for that. Actually i followed Justin style of learning since 1 month and it completely changed my life. Happy to have been learning now instead of studying. Enjoying my studies now as i am having more fun in learning things.
@@phanikatam4048 Hey Phani bro.. Me too from Andhra. Sorry for late response. Just now read your message. Definitely bro will share a example. Difficult to explain in detail in a comment but will try my best to share you what i learnt. Note below. You can apply this to any subject you study : 1) Ineffecient way of studying : When 10 hours of studying → 1 hour learning We are wasting lot of time here. 2) Efficient way of studying : When 1 hour of studying → 1 hour learning 3) How to study anything new ? : a) Instead of studying 100 units of detailed study on a particular topic , better study 100 units of anchor points. This will develop a prior knowledge and link on what you are studying. b) Study what is relevent and avoid the unecessary stuffs which is not that important. Later you can come back to the unecessary stuffs once you complete the important stuffs. c) Try to have more prior knowledge on next day before studying another new topic. d) Develop a foundation slowly before proceeding with complex stuffs. e) Develop a good cognitive load to your brain instead of blindly stuffing brain with pages of information.
@@RameshKumar-ng3nf got the point bro , are you a studying or job holder ? I am using blooms taxanomy which helping a lot for me ...but i bit confused first i applied blooms taxonomy like thinking in plan text learning than visualising concept so it makes hell to me Now everything going super fine easy ...now i need to complete 200 hours vedio lectures in 3 days ...hope everything goes well ...using blooms higher thinking , Feynman teaching with spaced revision ...hopes it goes well ... Bit anxiety about that ...it's some imp task ...Justin ones really a game changer but revision is highly important ... whatever we read or listen about blooms taxanomy... implementation is a task .... especially speed learning
@@phanikatam4048 Bro, i am working in IT industry in Bangalore since 1 year. I am still studying and upgrading myself for future. I read all your message in detail. One thing to say you is , you done a good job using blooms taxanomy & Feynman technique. Its already great.. Thats what is needed and nothing else. Regarding spaced repetition , i used to do a lot but now i stopped. I teach to my juniors and friends daily 1 hour and that itself becomes like a spaced repetition for me when they ask doubts. That helped for me. As you are in to time constraints and had to do speed learning, please follow what you are already doing which is good as per me. Please DONOT go into too many youtube videos of learning.. Stick to what you doing right now and focus on the work & study you need to do each day. Your study techniques is already good 👍
@@RameshKumar-ng3nf oh same here bro I am DevOps engineer ..find a adavence level architecture course which helps me a lot to gain knowledge i am 3+ years exp candidate... planning to switch new company Now i completely stick with blooms , teaching , not spaced revison in dates but i revise untill if feel enough and confident ... Same it
9:10 Yes, but such retrieval will end up causing more harm than good in language learning as it will interfere with natural language acquisition if done too early. Please see Dr. Stephen Krashen's Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis.
I think Justin overcomplicates learning because he has the courses. But honestly learning is a very natural process and what I’ve noticed from videos like these is that we need to focus on simple things (such as practice problems) instead of unnecessary techniques (such as concept mapping)
Lifting things is also something that we're able to do naturally. But to lift better, we still have to learn the correct posture for lifting. The same is true of learning.
When I started my physics degree I heard about retrieval practice for the first time. I heard how evidence-based it is etc... So I started just doing Anki, past papers and the exercise sheets I must say it almost ruined my whole carreer: my conceptual understanding was close to 0, so my memorization and procedural math skills had to carry me through the degree I heard about encoding half a year ago, and since then things are finally going much better again There are things you're good with just retrieval like business administration degrees, but it's insanely harmful for science to just rely on that
the free recall thing he's talking about is really close to the feynman technique. basically you explain the concept to yourself with a blank piece of paper to help you visualize the concepts.
Idk, Flash cards Kind of make sense for science as well for when you want to get down definitions etc. I mean you must remember newton's laws if you want to apply them to a problem. I only started cracking my physics degree when I complemented my problem sessions with flash cards.
Omg I had this same problem throughout my degree :/ Profs were always baffled by how even upper year students didn't seem to have a fluid understanding of key physics concepts, but this is what happens when past papers become the primary study method. Everyone around me was just doing past paper after past paper so I did the same and I feel like it barely got me anywhere conceptually. At the end of the day, it felt like I was just taking a bunch of meaningless integrals and like I had learned nothing. And it's really come back to bite me during my PhD :/ I think encoding (establishing relationships between concepts, finding the first principles, etc.) is absolutely so important to succeed in physics. When I look back to my high school days when I was a top student, the material was simple enough that I could effectively encode effortlessly...but that wasn't the case for me in uni. So now I'm trying to put effort into encoding so that I can fill in all the (huge) gaps in knowledge from my uni days.
@@felixhaag1335 Flashcards only help you to remember stuff, but to be fair conceptual knowledge in physics is not about memorization. In my opinion, applying it to problems by analyzing the laws and interactions of a given system is much more effective
Ok so basically make sure that when you recall your flash cards you are also conceptually integrating them with the mind-map; know where the pieces of the puzzle (flash cards) belong on the board (the big picture, aka mind map). Thanks Ben, it's a subtle distinction but very important!
This advice is all well and good when you're trying to actually learn, but that's not what I want to do. What I want to do is be able to recall the answers given the questions that come up on the exam. Understanding the subject is gonna make it easier to get the general idea out, but for the exact wording? Understanding is not gonna help with that one bit. And in the exam, the person grading me doesn't care how much I understand the subject, they just care about how much my wording matches the textbook's wording. So if I wanna make sure my chances are as high as possible, I better brute-force the exact wording into my head with flashcards. Now, I know what you're gonna say, "wouldn't it be better to start remembering the exact wording after you actually _understand_ the subject?" And my answer is, yeah, it would be better. But that assumes that I can understand the subject. And some subject are just very hard to understand. So, at least I think, it's not worth the effort to spend an hour understanding the subject, and then 30 minutes remembering the exact wording, instead of just brute-forcing it for 1 hour from the beginning. I also just don't want to learn some subjects. I'm not interested in learning how the frog pees or how this scientist discovered a slightly better way to infuse particles together, I'm interested in math, programming, and computers! So for those subjects I understand because I actually want to learn them, and for the others I just brute-force them with flashcards and after the exam's over I delete all my cards.
I think this depends on what it is you're studying. If it's language you're learning (and just the basics, to get you to the point where you're in a position to try deep things like poetry, for instance) then Anki is fantastic. The thing to remember is that you can make your own cards, and if you try to make really good ones, you're going to use higher level processing to do so, anyway. I'd say that beyond the bare basics, this would be an essential part of the automated spaced repetition part of your strategy (and all that is, is delegating the job of reminding you to test the leakiness of your base memory regularly, to a machine that doesn't get bored with this kind of thing.) (And if you're doing too many hours on the cards, just do less! It's really easy. The problem there is ambition, not something intrinsic to Anki.) I'm guessing this could be extended to things beyond language that end up having a "vocabulary" quality to them. If you're studying medicine, you need to refresh your vocabulary entry for all the knowledge you have of a tibia, occasionally - probably once every 500 years for that bone, though? It applies to something like calculus, too. The most important part of developing your underlying more general mathematical capabilities, to begin with, is working through the proofs, and learning from the masters, working through all your own trivial little exercises, too, because baby steps, and focusing on why things are done the way they are in the subject (which in many cases is little more than an advanced version of learning to be a good dog who knows how to sit). However, you move on from that. For a little while, you have quite a deep and broad understanding of single variable calculus swishing around in your head, but then you move on to differential equations, and instead of needing to be good at retrieving the best integration trick from a whole bag, you specialize in a thing called integration by parts. And you "automate" it, because that's just an adjunct to the real problems you're wrangling with at that time. You take something you had to carefully set out on the page in neat little tables, so that it didn't confuse you, and you make it into something you've abbreviated enough to almost do it "by mental arithmetic". In so doing, you begin to lose touch with the insights that you gained by learning the trick, before it became just a trick. And there's where some spaced repetition could help save some of what's leaking out of your head as you move on to the next great thing in a subject like maths. Those things you got down pat as nice fast facts and are beginning to forget? You might forget less of them if you just refreshed the memory attached to at least that part. And you could do better. You could create a flash card that depends on you remembering how some theorem starts. (Sort of like how people who remember poetry manage that - remember the last word of this line, and the first of next, and all the rest is automatically attached to that - until the links break). So with the integration by parts trick, you could keep reminding yourself of the more "basic" version that involves deeper knowledge than the later "high-speed/ computationally competent" version does. Make a good flash card - and learn from the hard work that this entails, too - and then let a computer do the boring job of scheduling the next prod of the memory. I don't know what ultimate value this would have, but it seems to offer the promise of greater retention of the more elementary (and fundamental - and often deepest) parts of what you learn for longer than is usual. A lot of math-trained people I've talked to say they haven't done any calculus for the last 20 years, and wouldn't know where to start any more (and many of these are engineers). Maybe it's OK to forget everything we learn, then? (Since it seems that this is what a lot of people do with their education in the long run, anyway.) If you don't remember it, you don't know it. That's probably not dogmatically true, though. Has to have a grain of truth in it, but it might in practice be a very tiny little grain.
i am using questioning first and visualise myself for better understanding and recall , now i apply the information to real world or perior knowledge , break the topic to dig deep or make relation to the topics, judge , now i teach the topic in spaced intervals , what you say ? any suggestions
@@phanikatam4048 My opinion is that it's important to make your own decks for spaced repetition as soon as you can. That way, you apply all the techniques you mention here to create the best cards you can (for you), so you get the benefits of all ways of learning. (And your card "switches all that back on" when it appears to test your memory in the future. The cards you remember well will only appear something like once a year or less, but that's what you want. It's nice to just be reminded to think again about what you figured out for yourself three years ago, instead of to just start to forget it, the way so many people do.
i think the problem is that no, you stop your persistent study of elementary integrals and work of exercises in symbolic manipulation after a time, but you don't move on at all in your approach to the subject because you can't, it doesn't let you. at every level there's just too much to learn a couple pages ahead, the stakes become far too high to let a single chapter slip through the cracks in your understanding, and its always so damn hard it might even be that you have nothing to learn from a subject so crazily difficult to understand; rather the value in such things is just that you have everything to gain when it somehow works out
I disagree. Flashcards can be useful if instead of putting isolated facts in put things like "read this paragraph" or "do this exercise". Flashcards are NOT only for isolated facts, but is often used to memorize isolated facts. You can even put "explain what a coholomogy group is" on a flashcard and test your ability to explain it whenever that card comes up. People have even been using Anki for scheduling when they should practice with their dog to do a particular trick. What you are describing is just a misuse/misunderstanding on how to use flashcards effectively. Anki is just a scheduler. You can put whatever you want on a flashcard, including more abstract tasks. For mathematical proofs, you can split them up into various flashcards and isolate important steps. You can also just have a flashcard "do the proof of the mean value theorem". There is nothing with with flashcards.
To me it's clear that Anki itself doesn't ask me to do Synthesis, Reorganisation, Comparison, Application and Re-Contextualisation as you put it. This may be true, but from my experience these things are more fun and more interesting anyways and I will do them all these things all the time anyways. What Anki does is helping me with the less fun and more tedious part; and it provides me the material to improve my findings in Synthesis, Reorganisation, Comparison, Application and Re-Contextualisation. So to my personal experience Anki seems extremely powerful to me, although of course it doesn't perform all parts of intellectual processes itself
Justin Sung's point - and it's a good one - is that you have to do the "lower-order" things (factual recall) as part of the "higher-order" things anyways. So, in general, just do the higher-order things. There's a fair amount of research that suggests this is the way to go. In some studies, students who practiced questions requiring higher-order thinking skills outperformed students who practiced questions requiring lower-order thinking skills on basic fact questions even though they had not practiced those basic fact questions before. Here are references discussing this basic principle: Jensen, J. L., McDaniel, M. A., Woodard, S. M., & Kummer, T. A. (2014). Teaching to the test… or testing to teach: Exams requiring higher order thinking skills encourage greater conceptual understanding. Educational Psychology Review, 26, 307-329. link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-013-9248-9 Rowland, C. A. (2014). The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: a meta-analytic review of the testing effect. Psychological bulletin, 140(6), 1432. www.researchgate.net/publication/264988491_The_Effect_of_Testing_Versus_Restudy_on_Retention_A_Meta-Analytic_Review_of_the_Testing_Effect McDaniel, M. A., Anderson, J. L., Derbish, M. H., & Morrisette, N. (2007). Testing the testing effect in the classroom. European journal of cognitive psychology, 19(4-5), 494-513. www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Testing-the-testing-effect-in-the-classroom-McDaniel-Anderson/5890758fdccf8e4ea75571f7d8741940660ba38f?p2df Agarwal, P. K. (2019). Retrieval practice & Bloom’s taxonomy: Do students need fact knowledge before higher order learning?. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(2), 189. psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2018-26228-001.pdf
I think what you are describing is just a misuse/misunderstanding on how to use flashcards effectively. Anki is just a scheduler. You can put whatever you want on a flashcard, including more abstract tasks. For mathematical proofs, you can split them up into various flashcards and isolate important steps. You can also just have a flashcard "do the proof of the mean value theorem". There is nothing with with flashcards. People have even been using Anki for scheduling when they should practice with their dog to do a particular trick.
I basically take his videos as alternatives anyway. I definitely do very well with some more widely known or old school methods that he says don't work (or to be fair often just says don't work for everyone). Like pomodoros sure don't work for everyone but they work incredibly well for me. I like learning alternative methods through Justin's videos though they can feel a little like he's selling me a timeshare at times. I figure he's coming at it from the perspective of someone who has made a career of helping people the usual stuff won't work for. Appreciate your background too though and your calling out inaccuracies. Honestly plan to learn form both of you from here on.
Hahah I love how smoothly and kindly he attacks Justin’s concepts. I’m not like taking sides but it was just like watching a beautifully arranged set of chess moves.
Wow I love this. I've been doing lots of concept mapping with less retrieval. Never bested my course mate who's into 'HUGE RETRIEVAL' and a little below optimum concept mapping than I do
This video and the interview with J. Sung was amazingly eye opening. Thanks, Dr. Keep! :) I'm trying to escape the flashcard only mindset (I almost shed tears, I'm not kidding), but now I'm struggling with this: Scheduling of free recall sessions. How to "program" when to do them? I.e., with what criteria to do the spacing?
I'm inclined to believe that even just "winging it" would mostly suffice. But I'm only now going to begin to research this. And I figured if by chance you read this comment and had something in the top of your mind, you could point me in the right direction. Again, thanks a lot anyways!
Just found the other video! You basically say to wing it. As someone who wrote thousands upon thousands of flashcards (basically hell) that makes me a bit anxious 😅
I don't think it's crazy to "wing it". But I also don't think it's crazy to set up some sort of schedule. I imagine most calendar apps would let you set up something like: 3 days, 1 week, 1 month, 4 months. Even just blocking off time once a week for free recall of any sort on material you've been learning lately would be helpful, IMO. It's not that winging it is optimal. It's that it's hard to know, in general, what the perfect interval would be (depends on your prior knowledge and encoding of the material, on the material itself, on how long you want to remember the stuff for, etc.). There's also just not enough research, IMO, to say "THIS IS THE WAY". So we have to rely on practical experience and do some personal experimentation.
@@benjaminkeep Yes, this makes complete sense. Honestly, given the fuzzy edges and rapid moprhing of content while doing free recall (vs. flashcards), maybe I should have anticipated your reply. ^^ Thanks again Dr.! :)
I agree - that's something I know less about, TBH. You might be interested in Temple Grandin and her book The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum. It's a topic I'd like to learn more about and her book has given me some insights.
Agreed, there isn't enough content out there for brains like ours. I've gotten a lot of value out of Dr. K's (aka Healthy Gamer GG) videos, when it comes to the specific neuroscience of ND brains, so hopefully that channel is of some use to you or some other readers! But yeah the intersection of "I'm ND but I want to not just learn tools to help me do normal things, I want to do advanced learning in an academic system that's made for people unlike me" is a content niche that I'm looking forward to seeing filled soon.
ADHD is simply an umbrella term for a condition where there's a deficit in attention wrt some task (meaning the level of attention elicited depends on the task/environment). There's no reason as of yet to believe "ADHD brains" are somehow fundamentally different from other brains wrt memory encoding & retrieval, other than the speed at which they occur may vary (again, depedning on the task which determines how much attention it elicits). The idea of memory encoding & retrieval is based, at least historically, on Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model (shown 1:45), and this model only outlines the discrete steps by which the processes occur and has nothing to explicitly say about how level of attention affects each process, though implicitly it may assume more attention = better encoding in general, which is pretty uncontroversial in cognitive science and neuroscience. If you really want to get down and dirty with how exactly different attentional mechanisms might result in different learning outcomes, you'll have to look into connectionist models in cognitive science and AI.
@@iranjackheelson I think there's plenty of reason to already believe that ADHD brains work different wrt memory, considering that it is pretty well documented that ADHD impacts working memory in those who have it. If it's to an extent that the impact is seen and documented, isn't that reason enough to investigate if there are differences in what's causing that? And, I think calling ADHD an umbrella term for less attention is also oversimplifying the matter. In the memory modal being mentioned, first stage starts with the sensory register, followed by the short-term store, and ends with the long-term store. It is also pretty well documented that folks with ADHD suffer from sensory hypersensitivities and meltdowns much like autisic people. Which also indicates that there's probably a difference in how sensory input is being processed. I could be way off base but I feel like the differences shouldn't be dismissed so easily.
What if I make a flashcard with a more open question? Instead of a simple word answer or a cloze-type flashcard, it's a broader question that should be answered with a paragraph. It would be very hard to simply memorize this "big" text, so when I'm reviewing the flashcards it should have a similar effect to free recall, right? And it would also have the benefits of the software-based spaced repetition, so I don't have to manually control and schedule the reviews.
Flashcards are supossed to be short, this is not how you use them. You're probably thinking more of a calendar, which is almost what software like Anki does, because their main goal is to determine when to show you the card again, it's like an advanced calendar. You may use Anki for this, but I think there's probably a better way?
2:23 correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I am aware the literature isnt really sure on what is the reason for forgetting information, it could be decay of the pathways, it could be lost cues or it could simply be overwritten (this information comes from the book "ultralearning")
I studied at the university of Maastricht. They use problem based learning. The method is studying with the help of a case. This is done in a student group of 12 students. There are 7 steps in the problem. Step 2 is that the group tries to define the problems in the case. Step three is gathering the information the members in the group already have that can be useful. Next step is figuring out what information you need to know to solve the problem. Next step is finding this information. So new information is embedded in existing information, that’s the most important thing. But also discussing it helps to get the new knowledge in your memory.
You can easily use flashcards to learn 10-25 words per day in a foreign language. If you learn words that you want to learn and then use them in sentences, what is the problem? Do you think that students forget them? I'm puzzled by the idea that they aren't useful because I have used them to learn a lot and learn it fast. The learning is not deep, but the word for "dog" or "run" in Chinese is just as simple as the English word. True, later you have to learn gou, gouzi, gougou, xiaogou, etc., but these are easy if you know -zi, repetition forms, and xiao.
I think initial language learning is probably the strongest case for flashcard use, and have used them that way before. Especially if you don't have to create cards from scratch. Free recall, however, is probably a stronger alternative method. But I say that only because of what we understand of what's going on cognitively - I know of no studies directly comparing the two for language learning. I also think many language learners hang on to flashcards as a study method for way too long instead of spending more time actually reading, listening, and speaking.
Thank you for sharing your opinion on the effectiveness of flashcards as a learning method. While everyone has their own preferred learning style, I would like to respectfully disagree with your statement that flashcards are not an effective learning tool. In fact, there are numerous studies that have shown the benefits of using flashcards for learning. One such study compared the effectiveness of flashcards to traditional teaching methods and found that flashcards led to significantly higher retention rates (cite: Study 1). Another study focused specifically on language learning and found that flashcards were an effective tool for improving vocabulary acquisition and retention (cite: Study 2). Furthermore, flashcards have been shown to be effective not just in the short-term, but also in improving long-term memory retention (cite: Study 3). This is particularly important for students who want to retain information for an extended period of time, such as for exam preparation or for use in their future career. Of course, every individual learns differently and what works for one person may not work for another. However, based on the scientific evidence, I would argue that flashcards are indeed an effective learning tool that should not be dismissed. Thank you for considering my perspective on this topic.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! I obviously don't know what studies you're referring to, but here are a couple of things to consider when evaluating learning research. 1) Consider what the comparison is. Flashcards are often superior to traditional study methods. But so is a lot of other things. Actually, traditional study methods (highlighting and generic re-reading) is probably the worst possible thing you can do. 2) Consider what the outcome measure is. If your test consists of flashcard-like questions (e.g., "What's the definition of disfluency?" "Who wrote the Magna Carta?"), flashcards focused on those questions would be quite a useful study technique. But a different kind of test, asking you questions you had never seen before and framed differently, like "Explain how disfluent text influences learning." or "How did the Magna Carta influence later documents on human rights?" would produce quite different results. My emphasis here and in other videos is on robust, durable, flexible learning leading to maximum transfer. It's not that flashcards are useless. I think they can play a support role in some cases. But I think they are largely overused and lead to the wrong kind of "cognitive work" needed to to facilitate the kind of learning that I'm concerned with.
by @tytsam72 Super Short summary of the video Encoding & Retrieval are both integral and important parts of effective studying or learning. We need to do both. Surprisingly according to a research, Retrieval in any form is usually more effective than Encoding in terms of applying or Retaining information as Knowledge. In other words, Doing effective Practice of the Skill matters a lot. or Tests. In this case, Studying to Learn with a target of getting good grades in an Examination is an act of applying the information or knowledge. So the most effective way of practicing is in the most similar way or format to how examinations will occur. It's like a sport. Practice your sport in the most realistic game time scenarios as often as possible. 00:00 Introduction 01:17 Our brain’s memory systems 02:38 Justin’s beef with active recall 03:29 Spaced repetition systems, “active recall”, and spaced retrieval practice 04:35 Why flashcard systems kind of suck 05:12 Justin’s recommendation 05:35 What are “desirable difficulties”? 07:03 The alternatives to flashcards 08:35 A good question to ask yourself when studying 10:02 An example study comparing elaborative encoding to retrieval practice 11:25 A true statement
On the “surprising” comment about retrieval being more effective- see my comment on a 2023 paper revisiting the 2011 paper. Both are important but sounds like the original study wasn’t quite apples-to-apples comparison.😊
SuperMemo does include most of those important parts through its "incremental learning" tools. You have different contexts if you read broadly (Piotr Wozniak uses the concept of "knowledge Darwinism"); you need to gradually rephrase the extracts you read and the cloze deletions (the "cards") you create; sometimes, you compare things using the "subset learning" and "neural review" tools, which are basically like taking your notes and books and read them all together. You still need to practice outside of the software though.
Great video! My takeaway is to focus on how to effectively recall better. A lot of students recall by flashcards, however this method decontextualize the material and can be ineffective. The flashcard systems gets the spaced part right and we can add onto this system with applying new context, comparing, and testing the material. Synthesis and reorganization is not something I understand right now, I'm not sure what this truly means.
I disagree. Flashcards can be useful if instead of putting isolated facts in put things like "read this paragraph" or "do this exercise". Flashcards are NOT only for isolated facts, but is often used to memorize isolated facts.
Hello i know im 3 months late, but I hope this is helpful for others. Synthesis is basically taking the information provided and making it more than than the sum of its parts, think of it as putting puzzle peaces together to form the whole picture.(if the picture is the context and puzzle wedges are the facts synthesis is how the wedges fit together) Reorganization is basically changing the form of a problem yet painting the overall content. Like how to transform a multiplication problem to a division problem.
There's a lot we can understand about how these desirable difficulty strategies work if you account for two key facts. 1) Long term memory is content-addressable, not index-addressable. 2) Automated action chains are released in response to situational signals at a high level of perceptual information processing, not sensory signals at a low level of processing.
About the necessity of higher order skills on the revision, its interesting to note, that Justin *agree* according to his video on efficient revision techniques.
Yes - I agree with a lot of what I've heard from him. Actually, I wish I would have emphasized a point he makes in his video on "you actually have to have something to retrieve to practice retrieval" (paraphrasing), because I suspect that one of the main problems with flashcarding is this. Rather than sitting there and putting the thing into a higher context or fixing it in your mind as much as you can, it's more like "okay, X = Y, NEXT!"
I am a little confused if my take on this is completely wrong. But what if for example I am studying pharmacology. I need to know from 300+ drugs every working mechanism, Indikation, contra indication, side effects, duration, location of application etc. My exams are Multiple Choice and my professor does questions about every little piece of information. Am I not better off just memorizing everything by heart? I don’t think I have the time for any other technique than just brute forcing it in. Or for example I need to know what the minimal inhibition concentration is in microbiology. For things like that I don’t need a bigger picture to understand it. It is just expected from me to know it by heart. So what I do is going through my lectures creating flash cards for every definition. Searching up what I don’t understand and also do cards for those informations and after that I do test questions from previous years and then just rely on spaced repetition to retrieve the information. I don’t have any topics that require deep understanding. I just need to know a lot of definitions. So is there any better way? Best regards David
Hi David, Your comment raises several questions. First, if all you want to do is memorize discrete bits of information, are flashcards the best way? To this, I think the answer is no. Flashcards may have a support role to play. But in this case, I would tend to favor memorization techniques like those used by memory athletes. One of the problems with flashcards is they don't help people encode information very well. You get a flashcard wrong and what do you do next? See it a little earlier next time? I would also use free recall, which, in this case, you could view as a kind of modified flashcard method. You want to be organizing the information in several different ways in your mind, which is going to make it more memorable. You might write down all of the drugs with the same side effects. Or all the topical drugs. Or oral drugs. Or you can cross side effects with application method. Or mechanisms with side effects. Even just sitting down and trying to remember all of the drugs that begin with "D" and their attendant qualities would probably be more effective than flashcards based on individual drugs (e.g., Drug X has Y contraindication, Z side effect, etc.). Using test questions from previous years, spaced out over time, however, is good preparation for the test. But there's another thing to consider. Things that make sense are much, much easier to remember than things that don't. There's a reason why drugs work they way they do. There are classes of drugs. There are drugs that work in an unusual way. This is a perfect domain for creating organized frameworks. The "deep understanding" that you say you don't need is exactly the kind of thing that makes things easier to remember. And some of the free recall recommendations I gave up above would be a basic start to doing that. Finally, I assume that you're a pharmacy student. If so, it worries me when you say that deep understanding isn't important. Pharmacists have people's lives in their hands. A deep understanding of drug interaction can save someone's life (or accidentally harm someone's life). Just because the test you're taking doesn't require you to have a deep understanding of the material doesn't mean that your profession doesn't. Don't let your learning be confined to what your teachers expect of you.
I'm an undergrad student who is going on his 10th year in his undergrad degree - yep, 10th year. There are many reasons for the delay, but one of the primary ones is because my study techniques and skills are not only ineffective at helping me remember (I don't remember anything from any of my past courses), but they also take MASSIVE amounts of time, causing me to get behind in my studies and ultimately failing the courses or having to drop them. I'm at a point where things feel extremely hopeless and I've wasted 10 years of my life. Out of desperation I'm here and I simply want to ask, if you'd be willing to offer a second of your time, are you aware of any companies or services out there who can coach me and help me develop better study skills and methods? I feel I need one-on-one help - someone that can actually sit down with me during an assignment and see how I go about trying to study something, and then showing me alternative approaches. Thank you for your time.
While I agree that tools like Anki alone will not enable you to master a subject it does provide a useful retrieval method for passing some of the hardest university exams in heavy data domain areas of study. I believe the majority of people use apps like Anki for tests where 75-99% of the test questions are non-essay related. They are image identification/location, lists, single or multi-word answers, multiple choice or fill in the blank which Anki is a great prep test tool for. For language learning, outside of someone to help you practice your language learning Anki is avail 24x7 to help you learn 10,000 words, sounds, sentence construction. With Anki add-ons it's limitations seem to be limited to the imagination. From the 1 page of the article (10:03) comparing effectiveness of Retrieval practice to Concept mapping (i.e. Mind Maps) I wouldn't think that any student only does mind maps to prepare for an exam.
I disagree. Flashcards can be useful if instead of putting isolated facts in put things like "read this paragraph" or "do this exercise". Flashcards are NOT only for isolated facts, but is often used to memorize isolated facts. You can even put "explain what a coholomogy group is" on a flashcard and test your ability to explain it whenever that card comes up. People have even been using Anki for scheduling when they should practice with their dog to do a particular trick. What you are describing is just a misuse/misunderstanding on how to use flashcards effectively. Anki is just a scheduler. You can put whatever you want on a flashcard, including more abstract tasks. For mathematical proofs, you can split them up into various flashcards and isolate important steps. You can also just have a flashcard "do the proof of the mean value theorem". There is nothing with with flashcards.
I think conceptual learning and language learning form a stark contrast. While there is a consensus in the learning community that flashcards are inefficient, its the exact opposite in the language learning community. When you are learning languages like japanese, Chinese or any language with ideographic written forms you need to memorize thousands of readings, meanings and characters and there's simply not a lot of different methods to learn them besides flashcards...
I disagree. In fact, one of the video clips that I used to start this video is from using a free recall method that doesn't use flashcards to facilitate vocabulary acquisition. Just to give you a counter-example of someone in the language community explicitly NOT advocating for flash card use - look at Steve Kaufmann. It's not that flashcards have absolutely no role to play in vocabulary acquisition, but they are way over-used and over-relied upon.
@@benjaminkeep Thank you for your reply. After rereading my comment I realised that I didn't convey my view propely, which may be due to the fact that I was very sleepy when writing it. To give a bit of background about me, I'm slowly approaching C2 fluency in English and I'm learning Japanese since 2 years. I know that I over-use on flashcards, but I think it's really easy to integrate into a busy life. I assume (I never tested it) that other learning styles require more time, which could make it more exhausting (mentally). I also think that I rely too much on flashcards, but I also practice a lot through conversations and immersion of native content. And regaring your mention of Steve Kaufmann, I think that he has a lot of dedication to language learning and improving himself, which paired with his available time, enables him to test out a lot of time intensive study methods.
Flashcards are supposed to be used as a supplement not the main part of your language learning thats the issue. The only words you should be making flashcards of are words youve in context such as a book or a tv show.
This discussion has me considering how some of the concepts could be integrated into flashcards - perhaps by including examples of usage on each card (which I've always recommended), or using just sample sentences rather than words in isolation, requiring the learner to retrieve the item in a context.
@@bm1259 yea but when you learning chinese and japanese flashcard system is so effective. Because to learn their writing character system you need rote memorization. You can’t just guess what they mean based on their character appearance. You can’t learn much from immersion because you can’t understand their writing system.
in the end I didn't really understand what is retrieving. Is it to just test a knowledge in different sets of problems? If so, how to do it? It kind of gets me stuck on the "go back to the book's exercises"
I'm kinda lost on how can I apply these techniques to my studying format. I have dyslexia and I'm want to get into Law school. In my country in order to get into law school through entrance exams applicants are given about 300 pages long entrance exam materials which you have to learn, memorize and apply to said exams tasks. Time given to learn these are usually 1 month These tasks are multiple choices questions, write down definitions (aka mini essay), legal cases, and essays. Biggest issues that I have is multiple choices and writing long but also detailed essay writing. Also I have difficulty to spot information that are confusing to me...
loved using flash cards to study. the points you mentioned are no inherent flaws to flashcards I would argue, with things like anki you have the opportunity to challenge yourself to apply the points you made. Edit: typo
This worked well in college where there was less information to encode and it tested more of your conceptual understanding. In medical school, there are 2 main limitations. 1. Huge amount of information 2. Lack of resources and time. Thats why Anki is so helpful. There are already Anki resources out there and not enough time for spaced retrieval practrices.
Can you do a viedeo thats called: "Basics of learning". You can indroduce various types of learning like you did in the list 8:15 (ex. what is synthesis and reorganisation). Then you can break down some common studie strategies that involves some of the aspects from the list and at the end we can decide, wich one we'd like to try out. Also a pretty nice tech Yt (jv scholz) was talking about a pomodoro technique. Maybe you can include it too.
Hey Benjamin!! My semester in uni hast just started and it is NOT going well. In the second week we had an exam, and I failed it… it’s really frustrating that I know all this information about learning (free recall, deliberate practice and spaced repetition) to just not do great. I do not know if I did something wrong in my learning process, or perhaps the course is challenging (a lot of people on my class also failed). The lack of time is also something I struggle with. Spaced repetition is very demanding since it obviously requires a lot of time. My solution was to do a revision timetable, so the topics I didn’t understand I marked them as red, and started from there. But even keeping in time with this timetable was challenging. This exam I was talking about was a math exam. I basically started the first days doing free recall, just so I could memorize the theory. Then, I started practicing problems. I think the first week was manageable. I understood (and sometimes apply) the theory correctly. But in week 2 all started going downhill. The topics were getting harder, and I had to memorize a lot of theory, and I also started to do past papers. I freaked out when I realized that I could (at best) just solve 1 or 2 (out of 5 big questions) questions of the entire test. At this stage (since there were 2 days left for the test and I started to feel the anxiety), I just started cramming. I did past papers, attempt to solve the questions without success, and see the solution. Sometimes I understood the solution, sometimes I just tried to memorize all the steps (since I couldn’t understand the solution as hard as I tried). Then, I went to other questions and followed this pattern. I guess that I just hoped that if I did more questions some could come in the exam. I know, I probably messed up with deliberate practice, but I did not have time to stop to understand something I was supposed to already understand. My anxiety was on the roof, believe me. Yes, there’s probably a LOT of factors that demonstrate why I failed, but it is not so easy to fix this factors, specially when you feel anxious about the time you have on your hands (and the other courses you also have to study for). Anyways, I already paid for more lessons (outside of my normal class time) for some help. My main question is, and sorry if you had to read a lot of info, why sometimes does it happen that we understand the theory and not seem able to apply it? Also, I would really appreciate some feedback about my learning process. You’re an amazing learning coach, keep the good work!!!
What you're experiencing is totally normal. And with math in particular, many students struggle with the transition from high school to university-level math. There is a big difference between knowing ABOUT something and being able to skillfully leverage that knowledge in a practical way. You may be experiencing this a bit both with your classwork and with studying techniques. Knowledge, especially in problem-solving subjects, is about application. Repeating textbook definitions or regurgitating standard examples doesn't cut it. I would recommend spending a lot of time not just solving problems, but comparing them to each other. Problem solving skill is a lot about noticing the features of the problem and how these features demand (or imply) certain kinds of solutions. I would lean into understanding the problems more deeply - notice what's similar and different about them and why certain sets of solutions work for some but not others. In the long run, I think it will serve you better to focus on the fundamentals in your class again. Let the short-term losses come (e.g., low grades on a couple of tests) as you build a stronger understanding of the stuff you're currently shaky on. You may know I'm not a big fan of spaced repetition (at least as expressed through flashcards). And perhaps you can see how valuable it would be to realize that you couldn't solve many of the problems on the test way earlier (like 2 or 3 weeks before the test as opposed to 2 days before the test). You want to be attempting problems (and paying close attention to why solutions work they way they do - say, with worked examples) early and often. Good luck!
Hey Benjamin!! Update: I’m failing almost everything. Now that I’m in uni it seems that I was not as clever as I thought myself to be. I made new friends and I feel I’m not extraordinary at all. I fail the tests that they at least pass, or get worse grades than them. It kinda sucks when you’re not anymore the “smartest” in the group. I’m studying my ass off, pulling all nighters before my exams (ik that it is not recommended, but because of the complexity of the topics I have to put in a lot of work), and it is not getting better. Kinda feel like giving up bc there’s no magic solution to this. I do not know what to do to become a high achiever student, even though I know all the “effective study techniques” there are in this world. I guess I do need quite a lot of help, and I was wondering if you offer that kind of help for students (perhaps through meetings). Anyhow, if not, I would really appreciate your take on this. What would you do in my situation?
Hi Swisssai. I'm in my first semester at Uni studying Law and have had major issues with anxiety from day one. I find that when I start getting anxious about deadlines, workload, failing exams, getting kicked off the course, etc, even basic tasks feel completely overwhelming and impossible. I then start wondering what is wrong with me, thinking I'm stupid and that I'm going to have to quit the course. I've had major panic attacks and total meltdowns, but I have begun to notice that after every panic attack and meltdown, I feel a lot better and much calmer. I can then begin to study again and start applying some of the new study techniques I am learning from Justin, Benjamin, and Koi Academy. I've found that the best way to get through anxiety, panic attacks, and meltdowns is to focus on breathing normally and allow them to run their course until they've gone. It may last a few minutes or take an hour, but eventually, they disappear, and I can crack on with my studies. I hope this helps. All the best with your studies. Jim
Justin Sung's study methods are common place in Asia. In Northeast Asian cultures like China, South Korea, and Japan, which are obsessed with studying to pass insanely tough college entrance exams, use similar techniques to memorize monstrous numbers of facts. One thing is that the more information you have organized in your head, the easier it is to remember additional facts as your brain connects everything. It's like the Western saying that the "the rich get richer" or in Asian terms "the smart get smarter". The unfortunate thing is that most people have great difficulty with higher level thinking skills like applying knowledge to different problem domains. For example, most STEM students have difficulty applying their science knowledge to the real world. Yes, they can solve textbook problems, but not in a different context and certainly not in a different problem domain. In engineering, we called it "back of the envelope" calculation to answer questions like the infamous "Mount Fuji" question. Listing your assumptions and your thinking process to come up with a "solution" are the most important. Some other thoughts. Mind maps are great if you think in words, but not as effective for visual, intuitive thinkers. Unlike Westerners, many Asians are visual thinkers and don't think in words. Connecting information is the optimal technique which beats any kind of flash cards (don't use them and don't find them effective) or any kind of memory techniques like spaced repetition or spaced retrieval as you placed it into crystallized knowledge. For many people this self-connecting of information will be near impossible, so stick with retrieval techniques and especially if you think verbally using words. Finally, if a blue genie shows up and grants you a wish, ask for more working memory as it's a major limitation of all people. Yes, you can chunk to kinda work around that limitation and can recite Pi to thousands of digits, but if you have better working memory you can chunk far more.
since im binge watching [ again ] from Justins and obviously, commented on your newer videos on [ memory palace ] , Combine - Spaced reptition + initial 1st level encoding [ properly define what terms and associated, and pre-knowledge ] + Open/free active recall which Ben, here has mentioned i would even go as far as using Jim Kwik's 6R and [ left column, right comments input with free-recall ] jumble them up into a mini-mind map and viola, as many prior have commented, the encoding is a problem if its not aforementioned and detailed properly what are the terms, and variables, it would be disastrous, however, thats where, the same above combination or initial encode and re-code later after free-recall-mind-map with 6R comes to play, since you wouldnt know what you dont know, the pre-define tests, or shall i put it as , [ bloom's taxonomy with feynman technique etc ], better focus can be done to pull up the more relevant or MOST annoying portion of learning the htings that you need P.s flash cards are good, if its ONLY questions, for the person to fill in actively, with no answers next , and [ re-trace back to the 3rd-encoding/ definition for one's brain ] as for those pesky math, or logic related, Benjamin with his recent video, patterns DO emerge once you try to rote memorize the basic stuff, or do until the brain optimises itself to [ remember ], e.g that same car you see every day, you know WHO the driver is, and if its different person, you would notice because it [ sticks out like a sore thumb ] , and thats what, and why [ sticking out like a annoying blimp ] , which are [ free -recall ] and [ tests] are for , it triggers the brain to [ play the game ] since it bugs out . just my 2cents worth, again , from re-binge watching all the mentioned youtubers' videos
hey, how would you evaluate the usage of flash cards where some should not simply remember just one concept but instead where one has to combine several concepts together and explain why this concept works and why the concept is important? would this fall under a higher order of retrieval practice or am i just deluding myself?
I find the video very enlightening in some ways. However, I don't understand why these two concepts are compared in terms of how effective they are. As I understand, they operate at different stages of the learning process. According to what is said in the video, encoding is about moving information from STM to LTM and retrieval is about recalling information from LTM memory. But to apply retrieval you necessarily need something to retrieve so encoding (which can be good or bad) must be done before retrieval. This seems to imply that how well you can recall something is linked to how good your encoding was in the first place. What I am trying to establish is that encoding is a prerequisite for retrieval, not an alternative technique.
You have verbalised what I wished Justin could have expanded on. His approach is encoding-focussed, which is great when you want to gain initial understanding of the materials. But as soon as you have a rough shape of the information, I would advocate pivoting to encoding practices asap. For law and maths, my most efficient encoding method is to attempt a problem question as soon as possible. It can give you headaches, but that’s because your brain is processing so much more complex information than reading alone. Plus, it is efficient because solving one problem (and learning from the feedback) can give you as much learning as reading the textbooks and watching lectures and attempting a problem combined. PS. I wonder if Justin’s channel is encoding-focused, while my approach (and yours I suppose) is more encoding-focused than his because of the difference in how each subject is tested. The testing of law students is substantially based on how they apply and evaluate the law, and there is less focus on remembering the information. This is the case at least at my institution where they have changed to open-book exams.
I can never finish Justin sungs videos in one go.. in the beginning i used to watch them completely, now i feel he repeats the same things.. either i get distracted or frustrated or down right bored without reaching the main point
Yes, his videos have worked very well for me--I aced my finals-so very helpful. Anki seems to be greared more to subjects that require a lot of rote learning, like medicine, of which I'm not a student. However, I do expect to use Anki in some form in law school. Following you now, too. :)
I really enjoy your video. It's very different and more clear when an actual scientist explaining it. Anyway, Can you please make a guide how to learn in a fast changing industries like computer science, thanks.
Anatomy is a perfect place for higher order learning. What is the study of anatomy but the study of body systems and how they relate to each other? What do these systems (and sub-systems, and sub-sub-systems) accomplish? What is their purpose? And how do all of the parts work together to accomplish this purpose? And what happens when something goes wrong? And what about comparing the anatomies of different kinds of animals? And how various parts evolved to accomplish different tasks?
Hi Ben, Great stuff! I got something out of this video and the more of yours I watch, the more I want to make my own response. I'm a bit busy at the moment but at some point, I might do one. 😆
Thanks, so how would you apply retrieval, to someone studying, say, the Polish language. I have a 1-1 session with a tutor once a week, and we write stuff in a document as we go for later use. Then I use duloingo daily to help. How could some one enhance this process by applying the techniques you are talking about? In other words, if I had some extra time to add to my current process, what should I add? Many thanks for a great video. :-)
So, it seems to me that you need to apply the information so you can encode it and place it in memory? When you do this your brain creates more anchores ( experience) in the brain for long memory? I'm actually studying for a IT cert and what aI always do is Lab the problem, take a break and do it again the next day. I also go through basic troubleshooting situations to get a more comprehensive understanding of the problem. My system is read apply test, if I fail then see what I did wrong and repeat. You also have to make sure not to burn out. Tests should be short and sweet. Then take all the small steps and test them all together.
Dr. Keep, these are excellent videos an I appreciate it. I'd be curious how you can apply this to chess learning? Many tactics are using spaced repetition to drill the same move.... How could one improve more quickly at chess?
You should check out Bryan Castro's channel! www.youtube.com/@BetterChessTraining/featured He's a great guy and knows a lot about chess. We did a collab video a while back on chess training techniques: th-cam.com/video/pIE5hD09yi4/w-d-xo.html
Does any of Justin's courses or methods applicable to language learning, or that is too separate thing for any of these methods to be effective like they for law or medical school ?
I believe the flash card method has its benefits when it comes to Loci methods of retention. The method of Loci, better known as a _mental palace,_ is a technique for mentally categorizing information using spacial imaginative pneumonic devices. The key here using cognitive synthesis to create connections.
I know something about levels of processing. As a general principle that describes a large number of experimental results (and a rule-of-thumb guide for learners), it's great. But encoding is complex - there are lots of studies that complicate the basic idea that encoding on meaning (deeper processing) is always good and encoding on sound or letter shape (shallow processing) is always bad. I totally agree with Justin that many people do not encode very deeply. But how we encode something also depends on how we want to ultimately use it. As I say at the end of the video, using good encoding processes and retrieval processes together is really what will be effective in the long run.
Could you please clarify: higher level 'cognitive' associations (e.g., built via Concept Mapping) leads to worse recall performance than retrieval practice? Doesn't this conflict with what is suggested earlier in the video using the Legos? Sorry if I missed something important here.
free recall idea sounds like the feynman technique that was pretty popular a few years back. basically explaining to yourself using a piece of paper the whole concept.
Yep, you can certainly include self-explanations with free recall. Also, the creation of visualizations. The key part is to rely on your memory and not reference materials while you're doing this (using reference materials only after you've exhausted what you can do by yourself).
I was wondering, for 10:04, what the difference between the retrieval and encoding practices are? From what I understand, both you and Justin are advocating the same types of techniques. In the Spaced Retrieval Practice, and Justin's studying practices, both encoding and retrieval are utilized to learn. Is this also something you may agree with? Thank you in advance!
It's a good question that I probably should have elaborated more on. In that particular study, they used concept mapping as the encoding technique. After students studied the text for five minutes, they had students build concept maps (where one node == one idea and links between ideas are represented by lines) in the presence of the text they were trying to understand. They gave students an example concept map and told them about the purpose of concept mapping. So the students had paper and pencils, the example concept map, and - importantly - the text they were trying to learn from all before them. They had 25 minutes to do so ( In the retrieval condition they used free recall. After studying the text for five minutes (same as the encoding condition), they asked students to type into a blank box on the computer any information they could remember, in any order. They had ten minutes to do this. Then they did another round of this (5 minutes with the text, 10 minutes allotted for free recall). In addition to short answer tests with verbatim and inferential questions, students also took a concept mapping test (that is, they were asked to create a concept map of the material they had learned) and those in the retrieval condition still did (a lot) better on that. Someone else mentioned that the concept mapping technique used in that paper wasn't what Justin advocates (true, AFAIK) and that a more effective elaborative encoding technique would have shown better results. It's possible, and maybe a good thing to look at for a future study. Not sure if this is also your question, but the fundamental difference between encoding techniques and retrieval techniques is that encoding occurs when you first learn the material and retrieval is about remembering the material again (which traditionally has gotten a lot less attention as a study technique). Cognitively, these are thought to be quite separate processes; I think of retrieval as occurring only after things have been "cleared" from working memory. There are study approaches that kind of seem in the middle, like immediately doing a mind-map after reading something. There might be some stuff in your working memory, but you'll also be recalling a fair amount from long-term memory too (even though you just put it there). The key practical difference is often whether you "study" with your study materials (e.g., your textbook opened to the relevant page) and you're able to refer to them whenever you want OR you study without access to your materials (temporarily). The latter is, generally speaking, what you want to do. Yes - I think I largely agree with Justin from what I understand of his position. Both encoding and retrieval are important for learning - you can do both poorly or do both well or do one poorly but the other well. Certainly we agree that fact-based flashcard retrieval is not terribly good. But if I had to pick only one technique to do forever it would be free recall.
@@benjaminkeep Thanks for your response. This definitely cleared things up! So, from what I understand, free recall IS used in Justin's studying technique. It is interesting to note, however, that his study methods don't necessarily require testing material or a concept mapping process. Rather, his learning style focuses on information being retrieved and re-encoded repeatedly, in an organic, and intuitive way, as you are reading/listening to the material. So, although we can access the material, mentally we are not relying on it to navigate the concepts. His videos may be creating confusion in terms of recall as the studying practice, and recall as the cognitive process. (I think) he is advocating that study material should be encoded well, using encoding techniques, before recalling them, using recalling techniques. Nonetheless, his encoding techniques, in general, uses a mixture of both encoding and active recall. In order to do this, old information is retrieved, processed with new information, evaluated and simplified, encoded back into our LTM in a different way, and those steps are repeated
How do you recommend putting this into a cohesive system... Im in medical school and I have to go through whole topics in a matter of days. I am 70% through the Justing Sung course... and although it has been useful im still struggling to put the whole system together of effective encoding and effective retrieval. Should I use pre-made decks instead of creating my own if I already did an effective encoding practice?
I would favor practice tests/questions over pre-made flashcard decks, if you can get your hands on them. Or doing free recall. If using flashcards, one question to ask yourself is how different would your homemade flashcards be from pre-made ones? If not that much different, then probably not worth it.
Hmmm I wonder whether yall are doing flash card apps dirty. It seems that your biggest problems with them is what is written on them, however that is completely in our control. What would you think about simply using Anki in particular only to determine how much more spacing/repetition is needed for the information to sink in while encouraging, for instance, application of a topic on one card and contextualization of it on another one etc.?
Does the flashcard change over time? Because your understanding should. Do you ever confront cues and contexts that you've never seen before? The fact that they are completely under our control is one of the limitations, not the benefits.
@@benjaminkeep Another problem is that you already know the knowledge first hand then write it down which decrease the surprise and dopamine when learning from flashcards. The flashcards usually look the same in the card format, the cover, the color, the only different is the content written which is different every time. Example : Red flashcard word "city (noun)", Red flashcard picture "car". Here is what my brain think:"Hey isnt this flashcards look just like those flashcards we use to remember some time ago?" My brain proceed to identify anything red and rectangle with a similar shape to the flashcards to be bored, even though i can change every content in the flashcard into something new like adding picture, idiom, stickers,.... My brain it remember the shape of the flashcards incredibly long while the content...not so much maybe because the brain have a grudge with flashcards because it associated with "bored" now?
I have High-function autism and think his videos are pretty helpful cuz I'm very slow learner & being a slow learner + Autism = AWFUL!!! So when I came across his and started using them with bit of my terms into it it made everything so much BETTER!! 😚
Any difference in the effectiveness of the different ways people do free recall? Like if one person uses pictures vs a concept map vs sentences and paragraphs…
I just started to use ANKI, and it helps me remember the "facts", but it doesn't help to understand topics, or play aorund with information to apply it. But I also tried Feynman Technique, and it works well. Just wondering, does fusing these two; ANKI and Feynman may give me resluts similar to "encoding"?
It's a reasonable approach. You also might consider relating the "facts" that you're learning to each other earlier on into meaningful units as you think about how these facts are relevant and how you might apply them. Encoding is not a study technique. It's a cognitive process. It's happening when you use flashcards, when you read, when you listen, go about your day, when you use the Feynman technique, etc.
I’m obviously screwed, as I don’t have eyes with laser beams. I use Anki for French and German. It’s good for words with a clear cut meaning and usage, such as the names of birds. It’s usually poor with verbs, because they often require a context. In that case I now use example phrases, which provide context and meaning.
What are the best ways to apply this to language learning? Is it possible to create flashcards that actually can help with effective contextual retrieval? I create sentences with English sentences on the front and force myself to recall the Russian translation. Should I do anything different? Thanks!
A technique that @will3267 told me about was to create new sentences based on the word on the card (or maybe a collection of words) when it comes up. This makes good sense to me. You might ask him more directly or maybe he has a video on this technique.
Justin Sung does not advocate against active recall, in fact, he encourages it. His point, though, as I understand it, is that you should focus on the bigger picture analysis and the connections *first*, when you are just starting to learn the new information, and then use non-linear active recall methods that cause you to think about the connections between the concepts, rather than just recall disparate facts. For example, it is not enough to memorize maths formulas and use them in solving math problems, you must first prove those formulas from what you already know, understand how and why they work and how they connect to other math topics, and *then* use them in practice.
Check out a conversation between Justin and I on this video here: th-cam.com/video/5cbQudbxHi4/w-d-xo.html.
Fair warning: it's a bit lengthier and more technical.
I don't mind! I hate short videos that don't give me ALL I Need.
Between Justin and ME, perhaps? Unless I is someone's first name.
@@usbeesthe use of I in the objective case is so common it's actually argued by grammarians. It's probably time for you and I to let it go. 😁
@@tolkienfan1972 I am a grammarian, and objective case rules still apply wherever I have taught, I teach, and wherever I have worked as a writer. 😉 In thanks for your video, this is my free study tip for you! 😊
@@tolkienfan1972 When people start saying "between we," then I'll be able to accept "I" in this case.
I have ADHD and have never been able to use flash cards for memorization. What I do for things that I need to memorize is to rewrite them as a children's book (with pictures and all). You need to know the material very well to be able to explain it in a way a child can understand. The thing is that I can just jump right into it and I will research as I go to fill in any blanks in the information. By the time it's done, I know the information inside and out.
I'm high functioning/asperger's and that's the only way I know how to master anything I learn. Thing is, it can be very time consuming. Especially, if you're in a STEAM major.
Can you give me an example? I might try this.
@@akhilmenoj8767 sure, whatever you're interested in, read it and highlight the most important information and/or examples. Rewrite those notes in a notebook and read it. In short, the material is in a language, grammar and structure I can better learn and understand. This method for most is very rote and potentially time consuming. Especially if you're studying STEAM related subjects where one chapter can easily be over 60 pages long.
@@neilrichardson7454 thanks I'll try it.
@@akhilmenoj8767 I hope it helps you. Good luck 🙂
The fact that hundreds of people can converse and contribute to this conversation (i.e they watched both of those videos) are simply amazing. A lot of people are learning how to study more effectively
What I liked about this video is that you didn't put all Justin's ideas in the trash. You talked to Justin's ideas and used them together with yours! I liked it very much
yes it was very classy constructive criticism, the best kind! super professional!
I speak 3 foreign languages-French, Spanish, and Japanese-and therefore have spent a lot of time memorizing things. In my opinion, focusing on efficacy alone is one of the most toxic conversations common among learners, particularly autodidacts. It’s a bit like running the 100m dash in preparation for winning the Boston marathon. Yeah, it’s more helpful than doing nothing, but you don’t win a marathon by sprinting. Nor even by running. You win a marathon by not stopping.
Similarly, the best methods are the ones that are feasible. Conversation may be more effective than flash cards, but it’s much less accessible. Indeed, the difficulty of finding a language partner, and the limited time you can spend practicing with them, often outweighs the advantages of having one. Moreover, conversations require a certain baseline knowledge that cannot itself be achieved through conversation alone. That baseline is easier to achieve through memorization not because memorization is better but because it’s infinitely faster and more accommodating.
There are ways to engage with memorization beyond just abstractions floating in the ether and anchored to a flash card only by a word and its definition. When memorizing kanji, for example, it’s useful to look at each component and focus on the parts that constitute the whole. Sometimes they’re meaningful, other times arbitrary, but the process of association unto itself makes the abstract more concrete. Does that mean that learning process ceases to be excruciating? To the degree that wearing a t-shirt in the freezing cold is better than going shirtless, yes. But you’re still going to suffer.
There’s a saying among artists: embrace the suck. Ultimately, your capacity to cope with that suck matters far more than your efforts to reduce it.
If there is a single domain where rota learning is the best method - probably language learning is the one. But have to be applied to learning full sentences (and properly translated-not by Google translator).
Very sensible take. IMO it's also important to point out that the actual learning happens when you see a word in different contexts "in the wild", not while doing flashcards. However, flashcards can be immensely useful for recognizing that word in the first place.
Yeah people think studying methods are magic or they can learn a language in a month. Truth is you'll have to sit down and do a lot of boring memorization.
@@vaxrvaxr I think that's true overall, and a good point. In fact, one-for-one meaning is more or less nonexistent between languages, aside from close neighbors. On the other hand, there are also things that just suck and nothing helps, such as conjugations, articles, genders, irregulars, or even spelling to some extent. It's that kind of stuff that really discourages people who thought they could do this without having to memorize stuff. But the truth is we memorize material even in our native languages, such as writing systems or vocabulary. No on is truly safe from the grind.
Ah thanks! I'm actually just learning Japanese and was looking to how encoding and SRS would play into it.
Right, so Anki would be easier than encoding, but would getting a language learning partner be a bad idea in general?
Former lawyer reacts to former doctor about learning! Haha this is great!
This one is going deep
Explain the deep in it 😬
@@knw-seeker6836you all are superficial. never heard of multidisciplinary?
@@Rdsa_1to be fair, both of these creators describe themselves as "former" in their past occupations
@@danyukhin I mean, they are current youtubers now lol
You put your finger on it! I was puzzled by Justin’s very simple and narrow definition of active recall, whereas in reality the study strategy he advocates for is precisely what active recall is supposed to be. He has a point though because there definitely are people who are under the impression that they’re practicing active recall while all they actually do is use flash cards to train their memorization skills. So, admittedly, the confusion stems from the imprecise naming of the concept. It would be better to call it something like “encoding-optimizing recall” that’s harder to oversimplify.
I stumbled on Justin' Sung then shortly thereafter stumbled on you Benjamin Keep. You are both very helpful and is what I need to improve my reading speed and comprehending then encode and recall information.
As mentioned in the comments, this is taught very early in Justin Sung course. The method consist in encoding the information well and then having a spacing interleaving retrieval to prevent forgetting and learn further.
It would be great to have a video of you and Justin together, or maybe a discord to discuss some ideas further.
Thank you for producing good content :)
Thanks for messaging - yeah, Justin reached out the other day. Would be great to collaborate on something!
@@benjaminkeep looking forward to that!
Hello Nicolas, could you mention the ideal spacing interval recommended by Justin?
@@g12nm Instead of going for ideal spacing, doing it is more important
@Aakanksha Desai thanks for the reply Aakansha, just being curious, does he mention anything like after 1 days then a week, then a month sort of stuff in his course.
Or is it more about the time elapse doesn't matter.
By YouSum Live
00:00:00 Retrieval vs. Encoding study techniques comparison.
00:01:03 Importance of effective encoding and retrieval in learning.
00:02:41 Critique of spaced repetition and flashcard-based systems.
00:05:40 Desirable difficulties for durable and flexible learning.
00:07:12 Synthesizing, reorganizing, and applying ideas for effective learning.
00:08:21 Effective retrieval practice involves higher-level thinking skills.
00:09:02 Applying knowledge in new contexts enhances retrieval effectiveness.
00:09:33 Free recall as a baseline for understanding and flexible usage.
00:10:08 Retrieval practice surpasses concept mapping in effectiveness.
00:11:08 Encouragement of both encoding and retrieval for optimal learning.
By YouSum Live
Thrilled that this popped up in my recommended. I love the precision and nuance of how you explain learning science, and I like how you talk about Justin without any drama or fuss. Subscribed.
My favorite learning method these days is throwing my ideas out to chat GPT about how I think something I learned connects to something else or applies. Or just start having a conversation asking it for more context. The conversation does a great job helping things sink in.
Can you give an example? Please?
@@krishanSharma.69.69f I just sort of think out loud or ask it to define something then dig in to ask it to explain the parts I didn't understand. (Just whittle down the definition until it's explained everything you don't get). And then I'll respond with things like, while talking with it about the As-a-service products that are coming up and everything as a subscription that there was a sort of parallel to Adam Smith's example of division of labor creating a coat. You simply have a conversation full of wonderings and observations that you might not feel free to waste the time of a human being with.
@cindystokes8347 😄 That's actually fun. It's like asking stupid question as a little kid to one's father but in this case the ai gives correct answers.
@@krishanSharma.69.69f The AI does not give correct answers unfortunately. ChatGPT is a language model; it reconstructs language to be as convincing as possible to an interpreter. This includes telling lies, giving fake quotes, etc. Using ChatGPT to learn is a bad strategy because of this. While it may get general things correct (although even this isn't ensured) it will almost certainly get nuanced issues and details incorrect.
@@bottlecap6169Sounds like a teacher in class 😂
Flashcards work well enough for me to get good exam results but if you want to get into a deeper level of understanding I think they won’t work. For something like Maths, remembering your thought process when you attempted a similar maths problem is helpful. Good insight btw I’m going to use the retrieval components from now!
Flashcards are an excellent way to first learn vocabulary in a foreign language. They are fast and efficient. The deeper encoding comes later from using the words when you speak, read, and write, and when you listen to others.
How do you encode
They are also useful for other things, in fact: they are useful for most things. Flashcards can be useful if instead of putting isolated facts in put things like "read this paragraph" or "do this exercise". Flashcards are NOT only for isolated facts, but is often used to memorize isolated facts.
You can even put "explain what a coholomogy group is" on a flashcard and test your ability to explain it whenever that card comes up. People have even been using Anki for scheduling when they should practice with their dog to do a particular trick.
What you are describing is just a misuse/misunderstanding on how to use flashcards effectively. Anki is just a scheduler. You can put whatever you want on a flashcard, including more abstract tasks. For mathematical proofs, you can split them up into various flashcards and isolate important steps. You can also just have a flashcard "do the proof of the mean value theorem". There is nothing with with flashcards.
Thank you for mentioning language. I watch Justin's videos, but he doesn't mention language as much as other subjects. When you are a beginner in a language, it is difficult to keep going to the next order in the pyramid. There isn't a lot of prior knowledge, especially when the target language is quite different from your native language ie English vs Korean lol
A lack of prior knowledge definitely impacts how we can engage in the material.
Justin's right - the theory of learning is complex. But then you have to boil it down to something that's teachable and workable in practice.
I've been playing with these ideas for over half a century, and for me what works is:
1) Encoding using mind maps focused on answering an explicit question - eg Why was Britain the first country to industrialise? Answering questions forces higher level thinking rather than just parroting your source.
2) Using spaced repetition algos to schedule review of the mind maps
3) Re-creating the mind map from memory to answer the same question or a related question that synthesises related maps - eg What was the role of the Royal Navy in driving the Industrial Revolution?
I evolved this back in the '70s during my undergraduate economics course at Cambridge - rated one of the best and toughest in the world. I got a 1st Class Degree working 9-5, 5 days per week. Many of my classmates, who were far more academically gifted than me, worked themselves to exhaustion for a poorer result. But they were studying hard, not smart...
This is great advice. For anyone else reading, note how during part (3) Tullochgorum suggests answering a different question than they did in part (1). This is ideally what you want to be doing. It's kind of like how physical therapists will work on stability by pushing your limb randomly in different directions. You're taking the material and molding it to answer different kinds of questions.
Amazing🎉
Super Short summary of the video
Encoding & Retrieval are both integral and important parts of effective studying or learning.
We need to do both.
Surprisingly according to a research, Retrieval in any form is usually more effective than Encoding in terms of applying or Retaining information as Knowledge.
In other words,
Doing effective Practice of the Skill matters a lot.
or
Tests.
In this case,
Studying to Learn with a target of getting good grades in an Examination
is an act of applying the information or knowledge.
So the most effective way of practicing is in the most similar way or format to how examinations will occur.
It's like a sport.
Practice your sport in the most realistic game time scenarios as often as possible.
I wish they had more examples of these concepts. Like have a walkthrough of how they study a new concept
I'm working on some videos that will address this, kind of like this one (th-cam.com/video/WRjsOU6mOp4/w-d-xo.html) but for learning concepts/ideas from books.
well justin did a good way to explain this idea. The way through a step by step walkthrough about how one studies is simply not the best case scenario because with one concept there are numerous possibilities of existing walkthrough (imagine a ball in a big room and the number of possibilities of that ball existing anywhere), it's really about the principle behind those concepts that really matters which you can use to tweak your preexisting concept or habit or your own walkthrough
Great video! It would be awesome if you also detailed your journey through law school-what were your study techniques, how they evolved over time, and how you would've studied in law school if you were given a chance to start all over again now that you have the tools from being a cognitive scientist. It would be an insightful watch!
Thanks for the suggestion!
I would really like to know that response video
That would be very interesting! There's not a lot of videos like this on youtube, infact I can only think of Justin and two other people on youtube even talking about this at all.
@@essennagerry so.. whos the other 2
@@kenal1532I would like to know too
Thank you Ben for sharing your years of experience with no strings attached😊
Holy crap, this video is super valuable and your replies to other commenters' questions are an absolute gold mine of not just insight but also compassion. I like your style. New sub here for sure! Thank you for investing so much time and effort into sharing your knowledge!
In the retrieval phase of learning the biggest and only thing that I take into account is your advice of "study in a way of how you want to apply it/test it". Flashcards are useful but not for everything, in learning vocabulary and concepts they can be but not for the rest. Doing practice questions, your method of free recall are other good examples of information retrieval on a more context based studying.
I disagree. Flashcards can be useful if instead of putting isolated facts in put things like "read this paragraph" or "do this exercise". Flashcards are NOT only for isolated facts, but is often used to memorize isolated facts.
You can even put "explain what a coholomogy group is" on a flashcard and test your ability to explain it whenever that card comes up. People have even been using Anki for scheduling when they should practice with their dog to do a particular trick.
What you are describing is just a misuse/misunderstanding on how to use flashcards effectively. Anki is just a scheduler. You can put whatever you want on a flashcard, including more abstract tasks.
I think what you're saying and what Justin's saying give me a much better idea of why I've had such poor results from most attempts at SRS for learning Japanese, and also why my experience with the Jalup flash card decks has been so much more successful than the rest of the SRS-based techniques I've tried. Combining SRS with reading (and not just reading the throw-away sentences on the front of the cards, but also the explanations on the back that I need to understand the new item) in the language seems consistent with what you're saying.
I'm on the other side of Japanese learning (11 years in-country after arriving with zero knowledge). I'm not sure where you are in your study journey, but in case it helps anyone else: SRS for base vocabulary (in Japanese, maybe 1000-3000 words, and the 2100-ish joyo kanji), as long as it's interspersed with high levels of input (listening and reading). A good resource is Kanji in Context, a reference for those joyo kanji.
Biggest advice: don't avoid kanji for "later," and don't focus on grammar rules beyond a few basics. Language construction and rules or "whys" are helpful for linguists, not really helpful for those of us learning to use the language. As we all know of our first languages, they're systems of convention, without deliberate design. So often asking "why?" boils down to "because a lot of people say it that way."
Note to myself: 5:25 Desirable difficulties helps learning. Examples of such techniques.
Huge respect for you 🙏
Seing the thumbnail and title , i thought you are going to criticize Justine Sung😃
But you appreciated it and also adviced many to go through his videos. Thanks for that.
Actually i followed Justin style of learning since 1 month and it completely changed my life. Happy to have been learning now instead of studying.
Enjoying my studies now as i am having more fun in learning things.
hey ramesh kumar i am from andhra might be you too let me how you doing blooms , can please explain to me with example ...
@@phanikatam4048 Hey Phani bro.. Me too from Andhra. Sorry for late response. Just now read your message.
Definitely bro will share a example. Difficult to explain in detail in a comment but will try my best to share you what i learnt.
Note below. You can apply this to any subject you study :
1) Ineffecient way of studying :
When 10 hours of studying → 1 hour learning
We are wasting lot of time here.
2) Efficient way of studying :
When 1 hour of studying → 1 hour learning
3) How to study anything new ? :
a) Instead of studying 100 units of detailed study on a particular topic , better study 100 units of anchor points. This will develop a prior knowledge and link on what you are studying.
b) Study what is relevent and avoid the unecessary stuffs which is not that important. Later you can come back to the unecessary stuffs once you complete the important stuffs.
c) Try to have more prior knowledge on next day before studying another new topic.
d) Develop a foundation slowly before proceeding with complex stuffs.
e) Develop a good cognitive load to your brain instead of blindly stuffing brain with pages of information.
@@RameshKumar-ng3nf got the point bro , are you a studying or job holder ?
I am using blooms taxanomy which helping a lot for me ...but i bit confused first i applied blooms taxonomy like thinking in plan text learning than visualising concept so it makes hell to me
Now everything going super fine easy ...now i need to complete 200 hours vedio lectures in 3 days ...hope everything goes well ...using blooms higher thinking , Feynman teaching with spaced revision ...hopes it goes well ...
Bit anxiety about that ...it's some imp task ...Justin ones really a game changer but revision is highly important ... whatever we read or listen about blooms taxanomy... implementation is a task .... especially speed learning
@@phanikatam4048 Bro, i am working in IT industry in Bangalore since 1 year. I am still studying and upgrading myself for future.
I read all your message in detail.
One thing to say you is , you done a good job using blooms taxanomy & Feynman technique. Its already great.. Thats what is needed and nothing else.
Regarding spaced repetition , i used to do a lot but now i stopped. I teach to my juniors and friends daily 1 hour and that itself becomes like a spaced repetition for me when they ask doubts. That helped for me.
As you are in to time constraints and had to do speed learning, please follow what you are already doing which is good as per me.
Please DONOT go into too many youtube videos of learning.. Stick to what you doing right now and focus on the work & study you need to do each day. Your study techniques is already good 👍
@@RameshKumar-ng3nf oh same here bro I am DevOps engineer ..find a adavence level architecture course which helps me a lot to gain knowledge i am 3+ years exp candidate... planning to switch new company
Now i completely stick with blooms , teaching , not spaced revison in dates but i revise untill if feel enough and confident ...
Same it
9:10 Yes, but such retrieval will end up causing more harm than good in language learning as it will interfere with natural language acquisition if done too early. Please see Dr. Stephen Krashen's Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis.
I think Justin overcomplicates learning because he has the courses. But honestly learning is a very natural process and what I’ve noticed from videos like these is that we need to focus on simple things (such as practice problems) instead of unnecessary techniques (such as concept mapping)
Lifting things is also something that we're able to do naturally. But to lift better, we still have to learn the correct posture for lifting. The same is true of learning.
Not a great analogy granted peoples form is perfect till polluted due to overcompensation or weaknesses growing up @@nothingchanges014
When I started my physics degree I heard about retrieval practice for the first time. I heard how evidence-based it is etc... So I started just doing Anki, past papers and the exercise sheets
I must say it almost ruined my whole carreer: my conceptual understanding was close to 0, so my memorization and procedural math skills had to carry me through the degree
I heard about encoding half a year ago, and since then things are finally going much better again
There are things you're good with just retrieval like business administration degrees, but it's insanely harmful for science to just rely on that
the free recall thing he's talking about is really close to the feynman technique. basically you explain the concept to yourself with a blank piece of paper to help you visualize the concepts.
Hi, fellow physics student. I am curious about some of the methods you apply when learning physics? Aside from doing tons of practice problems.
Idk, Flash cards Kind of make sense for science as well for when you want to get down definitions etc.
I mean you must remember newton's laws if you want to apply them to a problem.
I only started cracking my physics degree when I complemented my problem sessions with flash cards.
Omg I had this same problem throughout my degree :/ Profs were always baffled by how even upper year students didn't seem to have a fluid understanding of key physics concepts, but this is what happens when past papers become the primary study method. Everyone around me was just doing past paper after past paper so I did the same and I feel like it barely got me anywhere conceptually. At the end of the day, it felt like I was just taking a bunch of meaningless integrals and like I had learned nothing. And it's really come back to bite me during my PhD :/ I think encoding (establishing relationships between concepts, finding the first principles, etc.) is absolutely so important to succeed in physics. When I look back to my high school days when I was a top student, the material was simple enough that I could effectively encode effortlessly...but that wasn't the case for me in uni. So now I'm trying to put effort into encoding so that I can fill in all the (huge) gaps in knowledge from my uni days.
@@felixhaag1335 Flashcards only help you to remember stuff, but to be fair conceptual knowledge in physics is not about memorization. In my opinion, applying it to problems by analyzing the laws and interactions of a given system is much more effective
ah, spaced retrieval and repetition are different.
this is huge. thank you
Ok so basically make sure that when you recall your flash cards you are also conceptually integrating them with the mind-map; know where the pieces of the puzzle (flash cards) belong on the board (the big picture, aka mind map). Thanks Ben, it's a subtle distinction but very important!
This advice is all well and good when you're trying to actually learn, but that's not what I want to do. What I want to do is be able to recall the answers given the questions that come up on the exam. Understanding the subject is gonna make it easier to get the general idea out, but for the exact wording? Understanding is not gonna help with that one bit. And in the exam, the person grading me doesn't care how much I understand the subject, they just care about how much my wording matches the textbook's wording. So if I wanna make sure my chances are as high as possible, I better brute-force the exact wording into my head with flashcards.
Now, I know what you're gonna say, "wouldn't it be better to start remembering the exact wording after you actually _understand_ the subject?" And my answer is, yeah, it would be better. But that assumes that I can understand the subject. And some subject are just very hard to understand. So, at least I think, it's not worth the effort to spend an hour understanding the subject, and then 30 minutes remembering the exact wording, instead of just brute-forcing it for 1 hour from the beginning.
I also just don't want to learn some subjects. I'm not interested in learning how the frog pees or how this scientist discovered a slightly better way to infuse particles together, I'm interested in math, programming, and computers! So for those subjects I understand because I actually want to learn them, and for the others I just brute-force them with flashcards and after the exam's over I delete all my cards.
You just got a sub. Man why don't you have more subs. This is great stuff man, keep it up.
I think this depends on what it is you're studying. If it's language you're learning (and just the basics, to get you to the point where you're in a position to try deep things like poetry, for instance) then Anki is fantastic. The thing to remember is that you can make your own cards, and if you try to make really good ones, you're going to use higher level processing to do so, anyway. I'd say that beyond the bare basics, this would be an essential part of the automated spaced repetition part of your strategy (and all that is, is delegating the job of reminding you to test the leakiness of your base memory regularly, to a machine that doesn't get bored with this kind of thing.) (And if you're doing too many hours on the cards, just do less! It's really easy. The problem there is ambition, not something intrinsic to Anki.)
I'm guessing this could be extended to things beyond language that end up having a "vocabulary" quality to them. If you're studying medicine, you need to refresh your vocabulary entry for all the knowledge you have of a tibia, occasionally - probably once every 500 years for that bone, though?
It applies to something like calculus, too. The most important part of developing your underlying more general mathematical capabilities, to begin with, is working through the proofs, and learning from the masters, working through all your own trivial little exercises, too, because baby steps, and focusing on why things are done the way they are in the subject (which in many cases is little more than an advanced version of learning to be a good dog who knows how to sit). However, you move on from that. For a little while, you have quite a deep and broad understanding of single variable calculus swishing around in your head, but then you move on to differential equations, and instead of needing to be good at retrieving the best integration trick from a whole bag, you specialize in a thing called integration by parts. And you "automate" it, because that's just an adjunct to the real problems you're wrangling with at that time. You take something you had to carefully set out on the page in neat little tables, so that it didn't confuse you, and you make it into something you've abbreviated enough to almost do it "by mental arithmetic". In so doing, you begin to lose touch with the insights that you gained by learning the trick, before it became just a trick.
And there's where some spaced repetition could help save some of what's leaking out of your head as you move on to the next great thing in a subject like maths. Those things you got down pat as nice fast facts and are beginning to forget? You might forget less of them if you just refreshed the memory attached to at least that part. And you could do better. You could create a flash card that depends on you remembering how some theorem starts. (Sort of like how people who remember poetry manage that - remember the last word of this line, and the first of next, and all the rest is automatically attached to that - until the links break). So with the integration by parts trick, you could keep reminding yourself of the more "basic" version that involves deeper knowledge than the later "high-speed/ computationally competent" version does. Make a good flash card - and learn from the hard work that this entails, too - and then let a computer do the boring job of scheduling the next prod of the memory.
I don't know what ultimate value this would have, but it seems to offer the promise of greater retention of the more elementary (and fundamental - and often deepest) parts of what you learn for longer than is usual. A lot of math-trained people I've talked to say they haven't done any calculus for the last 20 years, and wouldn't know where to start any more (and many of these are engineers). Maybe it's OK to forget everything we learn, then? (Since it seems that this is what a lot of people do with their education in the long run, anyway.)
If you don't remember it, you don't know it.
That's probably not dogmatically true, though. Has to have a grain of truth in it, but it might in practice be a very tiny little grain.
i am using questioning first and visualise myself for better understanding and recall , now i apply the information to real world or perior knowledge , break the topic to dig deep or make relation to the topics, judge , now i teach the topic in spaced intervals , what you say ? any suggestions
@@phanikatam4048 My opinion is that it's important to make your own decks for spaced repetition as soon as you can. That way, you apply all the techniques you mention here to create the best cards you can (for you), so you get the benefits of all ways of learning. (And your card "switches all that back on" when it appears to test your memory in the future. The cards you remember well will only appear something like once a year or less, but that's what you want. It's nice to just be reminded to think again about what you figured out for yourself three years ago, instead of to just start to forget it, the way so many people do.
i think the problem is that no, you stop your persistent study of elementary integrals and work of exercises in symbolic manipulation after a time, but you don't move on at all in your approach to the subject because you can't, it doesn't let you. at every level there's just too much to learn a couple pages ahead, the stakes become far too high to let a single chapter slip through the cracks in your understanding, and its always so damn hard
it might even be that you have nothing to learn from a subject so crazily difficult to understand; rather the value in such things is just that you have everything to gain when it somehow works out
I disagree. Flashcards can be useful if instead of putting isolated facts in put things like "read this paragraph" or "do this exercise". Flashcards are NOT only for isolated facts, but is often used to memorize isolated facts.
You can even put "explain what a coholomogy group is" on a flashcard and test your ability to explain it whenever that card comes up. People have even been using Anki for scheduling when they should practice with their dog to do a particular trick.
What you are describing is just a misuse/misunderstanding on how to use flashcards effectively. Anki is just a scheduler. You can put whatever you want on a flashcard, including more abstract tasks. For mathematical proofs, you can split them up into various flashcards and isolate important steps. You can also just have a flashcard "do the proof of the mean value theorem". There is nothing with with flashcards.
Gosh, I wish I didn't find learning so difficult. Thanks for taking the time to make this video, but my brain just exploded. Kind regard, C.
My condolences. On the plus side, you seem to have a remarkably functional exploded brain. 🙂
To me it's clear that Anki itself doesn't ask me to do Synthesis, Reorganisation, Comparison, Application and Re-Contextualisation as you put it. This may be true, but from my experience these things are more fun and more interesting anyways and I will do them all these things all the time anyways. What Anki does is helping me with the less fun and more tedious part; and it provides me the material to improve my findings in Synthesis, Reorganisation, Comparison, Application and Re-Contextualisation. So to my personal experience Anki seems extremely powerful to me, although of course it doesn't perform all parts of intellectual processes itself
Justin Sung's point - and it's a good one - is that you have to do the "lower-order" things (factual recall) as part of the "higher-order" things anyways. So, in general, just do the higher-order things. There's a fair amount of research that suggests this is the way to go. In some studies, students who practiced questions requiring higher-order thinking skills outperformed students who practiced questions requiring lower-order thinking skills on basic fact questions even though they had not practiced those basic fact questions before. Here are references discussing this basic principle:
Jensen, J. L., McDaniel, M. A., Woodard, S. M., & Kummer, T. A. (2014). Teaching to the test… or testing to teach: Exams requiring higher order thinking skills encourage greater conceptual understanding. Educational Psychology Review, 26, 307-329. link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-013-9248-9
Rowland, C. A. (2014). The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: a meta-analytic review of the testing effect. Psychological bulletin, 140(6), 1432. www.researchgate.net/publication/264988491_The_Effect_of_Testing_Versus_Restudy_on_Retention_A_Meta-Analytic_Review_of_the_Testing_Effect
McDaniel, M. A., Anderson, J. L., Derbish, M. H., & Morrisette, N. (2007). Testing the testing effect in the classroom. European journal of cognitive psychology, 19(4-5), 494-513. www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Testing-the-testing-effect-in-the-classroom-McDaniel-Anderson/5890758fdccf8e4ea75571f7d8741940660ba38f?p2df
Agarwal, P. K. (2019). Retrieval practice & Bloom’s taxonomy: Do students need fact knowledge before higher order learning?. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(2), 189. psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2018-26228-001.pdf
Thank you for the references!
I think what you are describing is just a misuse/misunderstanding on how to use flashcards effectively. Anki is just a scheduler. You can put whatever you want on a flashcard, including more abstract tasks. For mathematical proofs, you can split them up into various flashcards and isolate important steps. You can also just have a flashcard "do the proof of the mean value theorem". There is nothing with with flashcards.
People have even been using Anki for scheduling when they should practice with their dog to do a particular trick.
I found this video through TH-cam recommendations, I used to watch Justin Sung videos. Great content keep it up!
I basically take his videos as alternatives anyway. I definitely do very well with some more widely known or old school methods that he says don't work (or to be fair often just says don't work for everyone). Like pomodoros sure don't work for everyone but they work incredibly well for me. I like learning alternative methods through Justin's videos though they can feel a little like he's selling me a timeshare at times. I figure he's coming at it from the perspective of someone who has made a career of helping people the usual stuff won't work for. Appreciate your background too though and your calling out inaccuracies. Honestly plan to learn form both of you from here on.
Hahah I love how smoothly and kindly he attacks Justin’s concepts. I’m not like taking sides but it was just like watching a beautifully arranged set of chess moves.
Wow I love this.
I've been doing lots of concept mapping with less retrieval. Never bested my course mate who's into 'HUGE RETRIEVAL' and a little below optimum concept mapping than I do
This video and the interview with J. Sung was amazingly eye opening. Thanks, Dr. Keep! :)
I'm trying to escape the flashcard only mindset (I almost shed tears, I'm not kidding), but now I'm struggling with this:
Scheduling of free recall sessions. How to "program" when to do them? I.e., with what criteria to do the spacing?
I'm inclined to believe that even just "winging it" would mostly suffice.
But I'm only now going to begin to research this. And I figured if by chance you read this comment and had something in the top of your mind, you could point me in the right direction.
Again, thanks a lot anyways!
Just found the other video!
You basically say to wing it. As someone who wrote thousands upon thousands of flashcards (basically hell) that makes me a bit anxious 😅
I don't think it's crazy to "wing it". But I also don't think it's crazy to set up some sort of schedule. I imagine most calendar apps would let you set up something like: 3 days, 1 week, 1 month, 4 months. Even just blocking off time once a week for free recall of any sort on material you've been learning lately would be helpful, IMO.
It's not that winging it is optimal. It's that it's hard to know, in general, what the perfect interval would be (depends on your prior knowledge and encoding of the material, on the material itself, on how long you want to remember the stuff for, etc.). There's also just not enough research, IMO, to say "THIS IS THE WAY". So we have to rely on practical experience and do some personal experimentation.
@@benjaminkeep Yes, this makes complete sense. Honestly, given the fuzzy edges and rapid moprhing of content while doing free recall (vs. flashcards), maybe I should have anticipated your reply. ^^
Thanks again Dr.! :)
It would be great to understand how these principles are different for ADHD and neurodivergent brains which have problems with working memory
I agree - that's something I know less about, TBH. You might be interested in Temple Grandin and her book The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum. It's a topic I'd like to learn more about and her book has given me some insights.
Agreed, there isn't enough content out there for brains like ours. I've gotten a lot of value out of Dr. K's (aka Healthy Gamer GG) videos, when it comes to the specific neuroscience of ND brains, so hopefully that channel is of some use to you or some other readers! But yeah the intersection of "I'm ND but I want to not just learn tools to help me do normal things, I want to do advanced learning in an academic system that's made for people unlike me" is a content niche that I'm looking forward to seeing filled soon.
ADHD is simply an umbrella term for a condition where there's a deficit in attention wrt some task (meaning the level of attention elicited depends on the task/environment). There's no reason as of yet to believe "ADHD brains" are somehow fundamentally different from other brains wrt memory encoding & retrieval, other than the speed at which they occur may vary (again, depedning on the task which determines how much attention it elicits). The idea of memory encoding & retrieval is based, at least historically, on Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model (shown 1:45), and this model only outlines the discrete steps by which the processes occur and has nothing to explicitly say about how level of attention affects each process, though implicitly it may assume more attention = better encoding in general, which is pretty uncontroversial in cognitive science and neuroscience. If you really want to get down and dirty with how exactly different attentional mechanisms might result in different learning outcomes, you'll have to look into connectionist models in cognitive science and AI.
@@iranjackheelson I think there's plenty of reason to already believe that ADHD brains work different wrt memory, considering that it is pretty well documented that ADHD impacts working memory in those who have it. If it's to an extent that the impact is seen and documented, isn't that reason enough to investigate if there are differences in what's causing that? And, I think calling ADHD an umbrella term for less attention is also oversimplifying the matter. In the memory modal being mentioned, first stage starts with the sensory register, followed by the short-term store, and ends with the long-term store. It is also pretty well documented that folks with ADHD suffer from sensory hypersensitivities and meltdowns much like autisic people. Which also indicates that there's probably a difference in how sensory input is being processed. I could be way off base but I feel like the differences shouldn't be dismissed so easily.
What if I make a flashcard with a more open question? Instead of a simple word answer or a cloze-type flashcard, it's a broader question that should be answered with a paragraph.
It would be very hard to simply memorize this "big" text, so when I'm reviewing the flashcards it should have a similar effect to free recall, right?
And it would also have the benefits of the software-based spaced repetition, so I don't have to manually control and schedule the reviews.
Flashcards are supossed to be short, this is not how you use them. You're probably thinking more of a calendar, which is almost what software like Anki does, because their main goal is to determine when to show you the card again, it's like an advanced calendar.
You may use Anki for this, but I think there's probably a better way?
2:23 correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I am aware the literature isnt really sure on what is the reason for forgetting information, it could be decay of the pathways, it could be lost cues or it could simply be overwritten (this information comes from the book "ultralearning")
I think the literature says more than that. Check out this video and the references in the description: th-cam.com/video/uv7uhI8nsbs/w-d-xo.html.
I just studied this Psychology and it I love how things are just doing “click” right now (kinda hard how to explain it)
I studied at the university of Maastricht. They use problem based learning. The method is studying with the help of a case. This is done in a student group of 12 students. There are 7 steps in the problem. Step 2 is that the group tries to define the problems in the case. Step three is gathering the information the members in the group already have that can be useful. Next step is figuring out what information you need to know to solve the problem. Next step is finding this information.
So new information is embedded in existing information, that’s the most important thing. But also discussing it helps to get the new knowledge in your memory.
You can easily use flashcards to learn 10-25 words per day in a foreign language. If you learn words that you want to learn and then use them in sentences, what is the problem? Do you think that students forget them? I'm puzzled by the idea that they aren't useful because I have used them to learn a lot and learn it fast. The learning is not deep, but the word for "dog" or "run" in Chinese is just as simple as the English word. True, later you have to learn gou, gouzi, gougou, xiaogou, etc., but these are easy if you know -zi, repetition forms, and xiao.
I think initial language learning is probably the strongest case for flashcard use, and have used them that way before. Especially if you don't have to create cards from scratch. Free recall, however, is probably a stronger alternative method. But I say that only because of what we understand of what's going on cognitively - I know of no studies directly comparing the two for language learning. I also think many language learners hang on to flashcards as a study method for way too long instead of spending more time actually reading, listening, and speaking.
Thank you for sharing your opinion on the effectiveness of flashcards as a learning method. While everyone has their own preferred learning style, I would like to respectfully disagree with your statement that flashcards are not an effective learning tool.
In fact, there are numerous studies that have shown the benefits of using flashcards for learning. One such study compared the effectiveness of flashcards to traditional teaching methods and found that flashcards led to significantly higher retention rates (cite: Study 1). Another study focused specifically on language learning and found that flashcards were an effective tool for improving vocabulary acquisition and retention (cite: Study 2).
Furthermore, flashcards have been shown to be effective not just in the short-term, but also in improving long-term memory retention (cite: Study 3). This is particularly important for students who want to retain information for an extended period of time, such as for exam preparation or for use in their future career.
Of course, every individual learns differently and what works for one person may not work for another. However, based on the scientific evidence, I would argue that flashcards are indeed an effective learning tool that should not be dismissed.
Thank you for considering my perspective on this topic.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
I obviously don't know what studies you're referring to, but here are a couple of things to consider when evaluating learning research.
1) Consider what the comparison is. Flashcards are often superior to traditional study methods. But so is a lot of other things. Actually, traditional study methods (highlighting and generic re-reading) is probably the worst possible thing you can do.
2) Consider what the outcome measure is. If your test consists of flashcard-like questions (e.g., "What's the definition of disfluency?" "Who wrote the Magna Carta?"), flashcards focused on those questions would be quite a useful study technique. But a different kind of test, asking you questions you had never seen before and framed differently, like "Explain how disfluent text influences learning." or "How did the Magna Carta influence later documents on human rights?" would produce quite different results.
My emphasis here and in other videos is on robust, durable, flexible learning leading to maximum transfer. It's not that flashcards are useless. I think they can play a support role in some cases. But I think they are largely overused and lead to the wrong kind of "cognitive work" needed to to facilitate the kind of learning that I'm concerned with.
by @tytsam72
Super Short summary of the video
Encoding & Retrieval are both integral and important parts of effective studying or learning.
We need to do both.
Surprisingly according to a research, Retrieval in any form is usually more effective than Encoding in terms of applying or Retaining information as Knowledge.
In other words,
Doing effective Practice of the Skill matters a lot.
or
Tests.
In this case,
Studying to Learn with a target of getting good grades in an Examination
is an act of applying the information or knowledge.
So the most effective way of practicing is in the most similar way or format to how examinations will occur.
It's like a sport.
Practice your sport in the most realistic game time scenarios as often as possible.
00:00 Introduction
01:17 Our brain’s memory systems
02:38 Justin’s beef with active recall
03:29 Spaced repetition systems, “active recall”, and spaced retrieval practice
04:35 Why flashcard systems kind of suck
05:12 Justin’s recommendation
05:35 What are “desirable difficulties”?
07:03 The alternatives to flashcards
08:35 A good question to ask yourself when studying
10:02 An example study comparing elaborative encoding to retrieval practice
11:25 A true statement
On the “surprising” comment about retrieval being more effective- see my comment on a 2023 paper revisiting the 2011 paper. Both are important but sounds like the original study wasn’t quite apples-to-apples comparison.😊
SuperMemo does include most of those important parts through its "incremental learning" tools. You have different contexts if you read broadly (Piotr Wozniak uses the concept of "knowledge Darwinism"); you need to gradually rephrase the extracts you read and the cloze deletions (the "cards") you create; sometimes, you compare things using the "subset learning" and "neural review" tools, which are basically like taking your notes and books and read them all together. You still need to practice outside of the software though.
Great video!
My takeaway is to focus on how to effectively recall better.
A lot of students recall by flashcards, however this method decontextualize the material and can be ineffective.
The flashcard systems gets the spaced part right and we can add onto this system with applying new context, comparing, and testing the material.
Synthesis and reorganization is not something I understand right now, I'm not sure what this truly means.
I disagree. Flashcards can be useful if instead of putting isolated facts in put things like "read this paragraph" or "do this exercise". Flashcards are NOT only for isolated facts, but is often used to memorize isolated facts.
Hello i know im 3 months late, but I hope this is helpful for others.
Synthesis is basically taking the information provided and making it more than than the sum of its parts, think of it as putting puzzle peaces together to form the whole picture.(if the picture is the context and puzzle wedges are the facts synthesis is how the wedges fit together)
Reorganization is basically changing the form of a problem yet painting the overall content. Like how to transform a multiplication problem to a division problem.
There's a lot we can understand about how these desirable difficulty strategies work if you account for two key facts. 1) Long term memory is content-addressable, not index-addressable. 2) Automated action chains are released in response to situational signals at a high level of perceptual information processing, not sensory signals at a low level of processing.
Just Brilliant how you analyze Justin's Video, congratulation, very effective and useful video, thanks!!!!
About the necessity of higher order skills on the revision, its interesting to note, that Justin *agree* according to his video on efficient revision techniques.
Yes - I agree with a lot of what I've heard from him. Actually, I wish I would have emphasized a point he makes in his video on "you actually have to have something to retrieve to practice retrieval" (paraphrasing), because I suspect that one of the main problems with flashcarding is this. Rather than sitting there and putting the thing into a higher context or fixing it in your mind as much as you can, it's more like "okay, X = Y, NEXT!"
I am a little confused if my take on this is completely wrong.
But what if for example I am studying pharmacology. I need to know from 300+ drugs every working mechanism, Indikation, contra indication, side effects, duration, location of application etc. My exams are Multiple Choice and my professor does questions about every little piece of information. Am I not better off just memorizing everything by heart? I don’t think I have the time for any other technique than just brute forcing it in. Or for example I need to know what the minimal inhibition concentration is in microbiology. For things like that I don’t need a bigger picture to understand it. It is just expected from me to know it by heart. So what I do is going through my lectures creating flash cards for every definition. Searching up what I don’t understand and also do cards for those informations and after that I do test questions from previous years and then just rely on spaced repetition to retrieve the information. I don’t have any topics that require deep understanding. I just need to know a lot of definitions. So is there any better way?
Best regards
David
Hi David,
Your comment raises several questions. First, if all you want to do is memorize discrete bits of information, are flashcards the best way? To this, I think the answer is no.
Flashcards may have a support role to play. But in this case, I would tend to favor memorization techniques like those used by memory athletes. One of the problems with flashcards is they don't help people encode information very well. You get a flashcard wrong and what do you do next? See it a little earlier next time? I would also use free recall, which, in this case, you could view as a kind of modified flashcard method. You want to be organizing the information in several different ways in your mind, which is going to make it more memorable. You might write down all of the drugs with the same side effects. Or all the topical drugs. Or oral drugs. Or you can cross side effects with application method. Or mechanisms with side effects. Even just sitting down and trying to remember all of the drugs that begin with "D" and their attendant qualities would probably be more effective than flashcards based on individual drugs (e.g., Drug X has Y contraindication, Z side effect, etc.).
Using test questions from previous years, spaced out over time, however, is good preparation for the test.
But there's another thing to consider. Things that make sense are much, much easier to remember than things that don't. There's a reason why drugs work they way they do. There are classes of drugs. There are drugs that work in an unusual way. This is a perfect domain for creating organized frameworks. The "deep understanding" that you say you don't need is exactly the kind of thing that makes things easier to remember. And some of the free recall recommendations I gave up above would be a basic start to doing that.
Finally, I assume that you're a pharmacy student. If so, it worries me when you say that deep understanding isn't important. Pharmacists have people's lives in their hands. A deep understanding of drug interaction can save someone's life (or accidentally harm someone's life). Just because the test you're taking doesn't require you to have a deep understanding of the material doesn't mean that your profession doesn't. Don't let your learning be confined to what your teachers expect of you.
I'm an undergrad student who is going on his 10th year in his undergrad degree - yep, 10th year. There are many reasons for the delay, but one of the primary ones is because my study techniques and skills are not only ineffective at helping me remember (I don't remember anything from any of my past courses), but they also take MASSIVE amounts of time, causing me to get behind in my studies and ultimately failing the courses or having to drop them.
I'm at a point where things feel extremely hopeless and I've wasted 10 years of my life. Out of desperation I'm here and I simply want to ask, if you'd be willing to offer a second of your time, are you aware of any companies or services out there who can coach me and help me develop better study skills and methods? I feel I need one-on-one help - someone that can actually sit down with me during an assignment and see how I go about trying to study something, and then showing me alternative approaches.
Thank you for your time.
While I agree that tools like Anki alone will not enable you to master a subject it does provide a useful retrieval method for passing some of the hardest university exams in heavy data domain areas of study. I believe the majority of people use apps like Anki for tests where 75-99% of the test questions are non-essay related. They are image identification/location, lists, single or multi-word answers, multiple choice or fill in the blank which Anki is a great prep test tool for. For language learning, outside of someone to help you practice your language learning Anki is avail 24x7 to help you learn 10,000 words, sounds, sentence construction. With Anki add-ons it's limitations seem to be limited to the imagination. From the 1 page of the article (10:03) comparing effectiveness of Retrieval practice to Concept mapping (i.e. Mind Maps) I wouldn't think that any student only does mind maps to prepare for an exam.
I disagree. Flashcards can be useful if instead of putting isolated facts in put things like "read this paragraph" or "do this exercise". Flashcards are NOT only for isolated facts, but is often used to memorize isolated facts.
You can even put "explain what a coholomogy group is" on a flashcard and test your ability to explain it whenever that card comes up. People have even been using Anki for scheduling when they should practice with their dog to do a particular trick.
What you are describing is just a misuse/misunderstanding on how to use flashcards effectively. Anki is just a scheduler. You can put whatever you want on a flashcard, including more abstract tasks. For mathematical proofs, you can split them up into various flashcards and isolate important steps. You can also just have a flashcard "do the proof of the mean value theorem". There is nothing with with flashcards.
I think conceptual learning and language learning form a stark contrast. While there is a consensus in the learning community that flashcards are inefficient, its the exact opposite in the language learning community. When you are learning languages like japanese, Chinese or any language with ideographic written forms you need to memorize thousands of readings, meanings and characters and there's simply not a lot of different methods to learn them besides flashcards...
I disagree. In fact, one of the video clips that I used to start this video is from using a free recall method that doesn't use flashcards to facilitate vocabulary acquisition. Just to give you a counter-example of someone in the language community explicitly NOT advocating for flash card use - look at Steve Kaufmann. It's not that flashcards have absolutely no role to play in vocabulary acquisition, but they are way over-used and over-relied upon.
@@benjaminkeep Thank you for your reply. After rereading my comment I realised that I didn't convey my view propely, which may be due to the fact that I was very sleepy when writing it. To give a bit of background about me, I'm slowly approaching C2 fluency in English and I'm learning Japanese since 2 years. I know that I over-use on flashcards, but I think it's really easy to integrate into a busy life. I assume (I never tested it) that other learning styles require more time, which could make it more exhausting (mentally). I also think that I rely too much on flashcards, but I also practice a lot through conversations and immersion of native content. And regaring your mention of Steve Kaufmann, I think that he has a lot of dedication to language learning and improving himself, which paired with his available time, enables him to test out a lot of time intensive study methods.
Flashcards are supposed to be used as a supplement not the main part of your language learning thats the issue. The only words you should be making flashcards of are words youve in context such as a book or a tv show.
This discussion has me considering how some of the concepts could be integrated into flashcards - perhaps by including examples of usage on each card (which I've always recommended), or using just sample sentences rather than words in isolation, requiring the learner to retrieve the item in a context.
@@bm1259 yea but when you learning chinese and japanese flashcard system is so effective. Because to learn their writing character system you need rote memorization. You can’t just guess what they mean based on their character appearance. You can’t learn much from immersion because you can’t understand their writing system.
in the end I didn't really understand what is retrieving.
Is it to just test a knowledge in different sets of problems?
If so, how to do it?
It kind of gets me stuck on the "go back to the book's exercises"
I'm kinda lost on how can I apply these techniques to my studying format. I have dyslexia and I'm want to get into Law school. In my country in order to get into law school through entrance exams applicants are given about 300 pages long entrance exam materials which you have to learn, memorize and apply to said exams tasks. Time given to learn these are usually 1 month
These tasks are multiple choices questions, write down definitions (aka mini essay), legal cases, and essays. Biggest issues that I have is multiple choices and writing long but also detailed essay writing.
Also I have difficulty to spot information that are confusing to me...
loved using flash cards to study. the points you mentioned are no inherent flaws to flashcards I would argue, with things like anki you have the opportunity to challenge yourself to apply the points you made.
Edit: typo
This worked well in college where there was less information to encode and it tested more of your conceptual understanding.
In medical school, there are 2 main limitations. 1. Huge amount of information 2. Lack of resources and time.
Thats why Anki is so helpful. There are already Anki resources out there and not enough time for spaced retrieval practrices.
Thanks for the video and providing your insight to all of the community :)
Can you do a viedeo thats called: "Basics of learning". You can indroduce various types of learning like you did in the list 8:15 (ex. what is synthesis and reorganisation). Then you can break down some common studie strategies that involves some of the aspects from the list and at the end we can decide, wich one we'd like to try out.
Also a pretty nice tech Yt (jv scholz) was talking about a pomodoro technique. Maybe you can include it too.
Hey Benjamin!! My semester in uni hast just started and it is NOT going well. In the second week we had an exam, and I failed it… it’s really frustrating that I know all this information about learning (free recall, deliberate practice and spaced repetition) to just not do great. I do not know if I did something wrong in my learning process, or perhaps the course is challenging (a lot of people on my class also failed). The lack of time is also something I struggle with. Spaced repetition is very demanding since it obviously requires a lot of time. My solution was to do a revision timetable, so the topics I didn’t understand I marked them as red, and started from there. But even keeping in time with this timetable was challenging. This exam I was talking about was a math exam. I basically started the first days doing free recall, just so I could memorize the theory. Then, I started practicing problems. I think the first week was manageable. I understood (and sometimes apply) the theory correctly. But in week 2 all started going downhill. The topics were getting harder, and I had to memorize a lot of theory, and I also started to do past papers. I freaked out when I realized that I could (at best) just solve 1 or 2 (out of 5 big questions) questions of the entire test. At this stage (since there were 2 days left for the test and I started to feel the anxiety), I just started cramming. I did past papers, attempt to solve the questions without success, and see the solution. Sometimes I understood the solution, sometimes I just tried to memorize all the steps (since I couldn’t understand the solution as hard as I tried). Then, I went to other questions and followed this pattern. I guess that I just hoped that if I did more questions some could come in the exam. I know, I probably messed up with deliberate practice, but I did not have time to stop to understand something I was supposed to already understand. My anxiety was on the roof, believe me. Yes, there’s probably a LOT of factors that demonstrate why I failed, but it is not so easy to fix this factors, specially when you feel anxious about the time you have on your hands (and the other courses you also have to study for). Anyways, I already paid for more lessons (outside of my normal class time) for some help. My main question is, and sorry if you had to read a lot of info, why sometimes does it happen that we understand the theory and not seem able to apply it? Also, I would really appreciate some feedback about my learning process. You’re an amazing learning coach, keep the good work!!!
What you're experiencing is totally normal. And with math in particular, many students struggle with the transition from high school to university-level math.
There is a big difference between knowing ABOUT something and being able to skillfully leverage that knowledge in a practical way. You may be experiencing this a bit both with your classwork and with studying techniques.
Knowledge, especially in problem-solving subjects, is about application. Repeating textbook definitions or regurgitating standard examples doesn't cut it. I would recommend spending a lot of time not just solving problems, but comparing them to each other.
Problem solving skill is a lot about noticing the features of the problem and how these features demand (or imply) certain kinds of solutions. I would lean into understanding the problems more deeply - notice what's similar and different about them and why certain sets of solutions work for some but not others.
In the long run, I think it will serve you better to focus on the fundamentals in your class again. Let the short-term losses come (e.g., low grades on a couple of tests) as you build a stronger understanding of the stuff you're currently shaky on.
You may know I'm not a big fan of spaced repetition (at least as expressed through flashcards). And perhaps you can see how valuable it would be to realize that you couldn't solve many of the problems on the test way earlier (like 2 or 3 weeks before the test as opposed to 2 days before the test). You want to be attempting problems (and paying close attention to why solutions work they way they do - say, with worked examples) early and often.
Good luck!
Hey Benjamin!! Update: I’m failing almost everything. Now that I’m in uni it seems that I was not as clever as I thought myself to be. I made new friends and I feel I’m not extraordinary at all. I fail the tests that they at least pass, or get worse grades than them. It kinda sucks when you’re not anymore the “smartest” in the group. I’m studying my ass off, pulling all nighters before my exams (ik that it is not recommended, but because of the complexity of the topics I have to put in a lot of work), and it is not getting better. Kinda feel like giving up bc there’s no magic solution to this. I do not know what to do to become a high achiever student, even though I know all the “effective study techniques” there are in this world. I guess I do need quite a lot of help, and I was wondering if you offer that kind of help for students (perhaps through meetings). Anyhow, if not, I would really appreciate your take on this. What would you do in my situation?
Hi Swisssai. I'm in my first semester at Uni studying Law and have had major issues with anxiety from day one. I find that when I start getting anxious about deadlines, workload, failing exams, getting kicked off the course, etc, even basic tasks feel completely overwhelming and impossible. I then start wondering what is wrong with me, thinking I'm stupid and that I'm going to have to quit the course. I've had major panic attacks and total meltdowns, but I have begun to notice that after every panic attack and meltdown, I feel a lot better and much calmer. I can then begin to study again and start applying some of the new study techniques I am learning from Justin, Benjamin, and Koi Academy. I've found that the best way to get through anxiety, panic attacks, and meltdowns is to focus on breathing normally and allow them to run their course until they've gone. It may last a few minutes or take an hour, but eventually, they disappear, and I can crack on with my studies. I hope this helps. All the best with your studies. Jim
Do you need help with maths? I really wonder what's making you struggle so much... Maths was never this hard.
Justin Sung's study methods are common place in Asia. In Northeast Asian cultures like China, South Korea, and Japan, which are obsessed with studying to pass insanely tough college entrance exams, use similar techniques to memorize monstrous numbers of facts. One thing is that the more information you have organized in your head, the easier it is to remember additional facts as your brain connects everything. It's like the Western saying that the "the rich get richer" or in Asian terms "the smart get smarter". The unfortunate thing is that most people have great difficulty with higher level thinking skills like applying knowledge to different problem domains. For example, most STEM students have difficulty applying their science knowledge to the real world. Yes, they can solve textbook problems, but not in a different context and certainly not in a different problem domain. In engineering, we called it "back of the envelope" calculation to answer questions like the infamous "Mount Fuji" question. Listing your assumptions and your thinking process to come up with a "solution" are the most important.
Some other thoughts. Mind maps are great if you think in words, but not as effective for visual, intuitive thinkers. Unlike Westerners, many Asians are visual thinkers and don't think in words. Connecting information is the optimal technique which beats any kind of flash cards (don't use them and don't find them effective) or any kind of memory techniques like spaced repetition or spaced retrieval as you placed it into crystallized knowledge. For many people this self-connecting of information will be near impossible, so stick with retrieval techniques and especially if you think verbally using words. Finally, if a blue genie shows up and grants you a wish, ask for more working memory as it's a major limitation of all people. Yes, you can chunk to kinda work around that limitation and can recite Pi to thousands of digits, but if you have better working memory you can chunk far more.
since im binge watching [ again ] from Justins and obviously, commented on your newer videos on [ memory palace ] ,
Combine - Spaced reptition + initial 1st level encoding [ properly define what terms and associated, and pre-knowledge ] + Open/free active recall which Ben, here has mentioned
i would even go as far as using Jim Kwik's 6R and [ left column, right comments input with free-recall ]
jumble them up into a mini-mind map and viola,
as many prior have commented, the encoding is a problem if its not aforementioned and detailed properly what are the terms, and variables, it would be disastrous,
however, thats where, the same above combination or initial encode and re-code later after free-recall-mind-map with 6R comes to play,
since you wouldnt know what you dont know, the pre-define tests, or shall i put it as , [ bloom's taxonomy with feynman technique etc ], better focus can be done to pull up the more relevant or MOST annoying portion of learning the htings that you need
P.s flash cards are good, if its ONLY questions, for the person to fill in actively, with no answers next , and [ re-trace back to the 3rd-encoding/ definition for one's brain ]
as for those pesky math, or logic related, Benjamin with his recent video, patterns DO emerge once you try to rote memorize the basic stuff, or do until the brain optimises itself to [ remember ], e.g that same car you see every day, you know WHO the driver is, and if its different person, you would notice because it [ sticks out like a sore thumb ] ,
and thats what, and why [ sticking out like a annoying blimp ] , which are [ free -recall ] and [ tests] are for , it triggers the brain to [ play the game ] since it bugs out .
just my 2cents worth, again , from re-binge watching all the mentioned youtubers' videos
so we have to use retrieval but incorporate synthesis, reorganization, comparison, application and context into it
Thank you Benjamin for your great sharing! Are there any books about learning that you would recommend?
Some book recommendations are here: www.benjaminkeep.com/recommended-reading/
@@benjaminkeep Thank you so much! This is super awesome!
Retrieval is the foundation of every individual learning session and the learning process as a whole.
hey, how would you evaluate the usage of flash cards where some should not simply remember just one concept but instead where one has to combine several concepts together and explain why this concept works and why the concept is important? would this fall under a higher order of retrieval practice or am i just deluding myself?
I find the video very enlightening in some ways. However, I don't understand why these two concepts are compared in terms of how effective they are. As I understand, they operate at different stages of the learning process. According to what is said in the video, encoding is about moving information from STM to LTM and retrieval is about recalling information from LTM memory. But to apply retrieval you necessarily need something to retrieve so encoding (which can be good or bad) must be done before retrieval. This seems to imply that how well you can recall something is linked to how good your encoding was in the first place. What I am trying to establish is that encoding is a prerequisite for retrieval, not an alternative technique.
So what if i do both? Spaced repetition and higher level thinking while testing myself with level 4-5 questions?
You have verbalised what I wished Justin could have expanded on. His approach is encoding-focussed, which is great when you want to gain initial understanding of the materials. But as soon as you have a rough shape of the information, I would advocate pivoting to encoding practices asap. For law and maths, my most efficient encoding method is to attempt a problem question as soon as possible. It can give you headaches, but that’s because your brain is processing so much more complex information than reading alone. Plus, it is efficient because solving one problem (and learning from the feedback) can give you as much learning as reading the textbooks and watching lectures and attempting a problem combined.
PS. I wonder if Justin’s channel is encoding-focused, while my approach (and yours I suppose) is more encoding-focused than his because of the difference in how each subject is tested. The testing of law students is substantially based on how they apply and evaluate the law, and there is less focus on remembering the information. This is the case at least at my institution where they have changed to open-book exams.
You mean retrieval focused right ?
I can never finish Justin sungs videos in one go.. in the beginning i used to watch them completely, now i feel he repeats the same things.. either i get distracted or frustrated or down right bored without reaching the main point
Yes, his videos have worked very well for me--I aced my finals-so very helpful. Anki seems to be greared more to subjects that require a lot of rote learning, like medicine, of which I'm not a student. However, I do expect to use Anki in some form in law school. Following you now, too. :)
The Go-Set behind you is nice :D
I really enjoy your video. It's very different and more clear when an actual scientist explaining it. Anyway, Can you please make a guide how to learn in a fast changing industries like computer science, thanks.
But how do you apply such higher level learning strategies to subjects like anatomy where you mainly just memorize stuff?
Anatomy is a perfect place for higher order learning. What is the study of anatomy but the study of body systems and how they relate to each other? What do these systems (and sub-systems, and sub-sub-systems) accomplish? What is their purpose? And how do all of the parts work together to accomplish this purpose? And what happens when something goes wrong? And what about comparing the anatomies of different kinds of animals? And how various parts evolved to accomplish different tasks?
Hi Ben,
Great stuff! I got something out of this video and the more of yours I watch, the more I want to make my own response. I'm a bit busy at the moment but at some point, I might do one. 😆
Thanks, so how would you apply retrieval, to someone studying, say, the Polish language. I have a 1-1 session with a tutor once a week, and we write stuff in a document as we go for later use. Then I use duloingo daily to help. How could some one enhance this process by applying the techniques you are talking about? In other words, if I had some extra time to add to my current process, what should I add? Many thanks for a great video. :-)
So, it seems to me that you need to apply the information so you can encode it and place it in memory? When you do this your brain creates more anchores ( experience) in the brain for long memory? I'm actually studying for a IT cert and what aI always do is Lab the problem, take a break and do it again the next day. I also go through basic troubleshooting situations to get a more comprehensive understanding of the problem. My system is read apply test, if I fail then see what I did wrong and repeat. You also have to make sure not to burn out. Tests should be short and sweet. Then take all the small steps and test them all together.
This was extremely helpful, thank you!
Dr. Keep, these are excellent videos an I appreciate it. I'd be curious how you can apply this to chess learning? Many tactics are using spaced repetition to drill the same move.... How could one improve more quickly at chess?
You should check out Bryan Castro's channel! www.youtube.com/@BetterChessTraining/featured
He's a great guy and knows a lot about chess. We did a collab video a while back on chess training techniques: th-cam.com/video/pIE5hD09yi4/w-d-xo.html
Does any of Justin's courses or methods applicable to language learning, or that is too separate thing for any of these methods to be effective like they for law or medical school ?
Yeah it works for languages
Encoding is practice interleaved for first time and higher order retrieval is interleaving in sessions ?
I believe the flash card method has its benefits when it comes to Loci methods of retention. The method of Loci, better known as a _mental palace,_ is a technique for mentally categorizing information using spacial imaginative pneumonic devices.
The key here using cognitive synthesis to create connections.
Also, have you looked into deeper processing( craik and lockart's) vs. retrieval. The first one might have to do with encoding
I know something about levels of processing. As a general principle that describes a large number of experimental results (and a rule-of-thumb guide for learners), it's great. But encoding is complex - there are lots of studies that complicate the basic idea that encoding on meaning (deeper processing) is always good and encoding on sound or letter shape (shallow processing) is always bad. I totally agree with Justin that many people do not encode very deeply. But how we encode something also depends on how we want to ultimately use it. As I say at the end of the video, using good encoding processes and retrieval processes together is really what will be effective in the long run.
Could you please clarify: higher level 'cognitive' associations (e.g., built via Concept Mapping) leads to worse recall performance than retrieval practice? Doesn't this conflict with what is suggested earlier in the video using the Legos? Sorry if I missed something important here.
free recall idea sounds like the feynman technique that was pretty popular a few years back. basically explaining to yourself using a piece of paper the whole concept.
Yep, you can certainly include self-explanations with free recall. Also, the creation of visualizations. The key part is to rely on your memory and not reference materials while you're doing this (using reference materials only after you've exhausted what you can do by yourself).
I was wondering, for 10:04, what the difference between the retrieval and encoding practices are? From what I understand, both you and Justin are advocating the same types of techniques. In the Spaced Retrieval Practice, and Justin's studying practices, both encoding and retrieval are utilized to learn. Is this also something you may agree with? Thank you in advance!
It's a good question that I probably should have elaborated more on. In that particular study, they used concept mapping as the encoding technique.
After students studied the text for five minutes, they had students build concept maps (where one node == one idea and links between ideas are represented by lines) in the presence of the text they were trying to understand. They gave students an example concept map and told them about the purpose of concept mapping. So the students had paper and pencils, the example concept map, and - importantly - the text they were trying to learn from all before them. They had 25 minutes to do so (
In the retrieval condition they used free recall. After studying the text for five minutes (same as the encoding condition), they asked students to type into a blank box on the computer any information they could remember, in any order. They had ten minutes to do this. Then they did another round of this (5 minutes with the text, 10 minutes allotted for free recall).
In addition to short answer tests with verbatim and inferential questions, students also took a concept mapping test (that is, they were asked to create a concept map of the material they had learned) and those in the retrieval condition still did (a lot) better on that.
Someone else mentioned that the concept mapping technique used in that paper wasn't what Justin advocates (true, AFAIK) and that a more effective elaborative encoding technique would have shown better results. It's possible, and maybe a good thing to look at for a future study.
Not sure if this is also your question, but the fundamental difference between encoding techniques and retrieval techniques is that encoding occurs when you first learn the material and retrieval is about remembering the material again (which traditionally has gotten a lot less attention as a study technique). Cognitively, these are thought to be quite separate processes; I think of retrieval as occurring only after things have been "cleared" from working memory. There are study approaches that kind of seem in the middle, like immediately doing a mind-map after reading something. There might be some stuff in your working memory, but you'll also be recalling a fair amount from long-term memory too (even though you just put it there). The key practical difference is often whether you "study" with your study materials (e.g., your textbook opened to the relevant page) and you're able to refer to them whenever you want OR you study without access to your materials (temporarily). The latter is, generally speaking, what you want to do.
Yes - I think I largely agree with Justin from what I understand of his position. Both encoding and retrieval are important for learning - you can do both poorly or do both well or do one poorly but the other well. Certainly we agree that fact-based flashcard retrieval is not terribly good. But if I had to pick only one technique to do forever it would be free recall.
@@benjaminkeep Thanks for your response. This definitely cleared things up! So, from what I understand, free recall IS used in Justin's studying technique. It is interesting to note, however, that his study methods don't necessarily require testing material or a concept mapping process. Rather, his learning style focuses on information being retrieved and re-encoded repeatedly, in an organic, and intuitive way, as you are reading/listening to the material. So, although we can access the material, mentally we are not relying on it to navigate the concepts.
His videos may be creating confusion in terms of recall as the studying practice, and recall as the cognitive process. (I think) he is advocating that study material should be encoded well, using encoding techniques, before recalling them, using recalling techniques. Nonetheless, his encoding techniques, in general, uses a mixture of both encoding and active recall. In order to do this, old information is retrieved, processed with new information, evaluated and simplified, encoded back into our LTM in a different way, and those steps are repeated
That sounds accurate, from what I understand of his approach.
How do you recommend putting this into a cohesive system... Im in medical school and I have to go through whole topics in a matter of days. I am 70% through the Justing Sung course... and although it has been useful im still struggling to put the whole system together of effective encoding and effective retrieval. Should I use pre-made decks instead of creating my own if I already did an effective encoding practice?
I would favor practice tests/questions over pre-made flashcard decks, if you can get your hands on them. Or doing free recall. If using flashcards, one question to ask yourself is how different would your homemade flashcards be from pre-made ones? If not that much different, then probably not worth it.
A question for Ben: Are you planning on writing a popular (not academic) book on learning or a related subject?
Hmmm I wonder whether yall are doing flash card apps dirty. It seems that your biggest problems with them is what is written on them, however that is completely in our control. What would you think about simply using Anki in particular only to determine how much more spacing/repetition is needed for the information to sink in while encouraging, for instance, application of a topic on one card and contextualization of it on another one etc.?
Does the flashcard change over time? Because your understanding should. Do you ever confront cues and contexts that you've never seen before? The fact that they are completely under our control is one of the limitations, not the benefits.
@@benjaminkeep Another problem is that you already know the knowledge first hand then write it down which decrease the surprise and dopamine when learning from flashcards. The flashcards usually look the same in the card format, the cover, the color, the only different is the content written which is different every time. Example : Red flashcard word "city (noun)", Red flashcard picture "car". Here is what my brain think:"Hey isnt this flashcards look just like those flashcards we use to remember some time ago?" My brain proceed to identify anything red and rectangle with a similar shape to the flashcards to be bored, even though i can change every content in the flashcard into something new like adding picture, idiom, stickers,.... My brain it remember the shape of the flashcards incredibly long while the content...not so much maybe because the brain have a grudge with flashcards because it associated with "bored" now?
I have High-function autism and think his videos are pretty helpful cuz I'm very slow learner & being a slow learner + Autism = AWFUL!!!
So when I came across his and started using them with bit of my terms into it it made everything so much BETTER!! 😚
Any difference in the effectiveness of the different ways people do free recall? Like if one person uses pictures vs a concept map vs sentences and paragraphs…
I just started to use ANKI, and it helps me remember the "facts", but it doesn't help to understand topics, or play aorund with information to apply it.
But I also tried Feynman Technique, and it works well.
Just wondering, does fusing these two; ANKI and Feynman may give me resluts similar to "encoding"?
It's a reasonable approach. You also might consider relating the "facts" that you're learning to each other earlier on into meaningful units as you think about how these facts are relevant and how you might apply them.
Encoding is not a study technique. It's a cognitive process. It's happening when you use flashcards, when you read, when you listen, go about your day, when you use the Feynman technique, etc.
I’m obviously screwed, as I don’t have eyes with laser beams. I use Anki for French and German. It’s good for words with a clear cut meaning and usage, such as the names of birds. It’s usually poor with verbs, because they often require a context. In that case I now use example phrases, which provide context and meaning.
Completely agree that for words with 1:1 mappings between the language (usually common nouns, but there are others), flashcards are a good fit.
What are the best ways to apply this to language learning? Is it possible to create flashcards that actually can help with effective contextual retrieval? I create sentences with English sentences on the front and force myself to recall the Russian translation. Should I do anything different? Thanks!
A technique that @will3267 told me about was to create new sentences based on the word on the card (or maybe a collection of words) when it comes up. This makes good sense to me. You might ask him more directly or maybe he has a video on this technique.
Justin Sung does not advocate against active recall, in fact, he encourages it. His point, though, as I understand it, is that you should focus on the bigger picture analysis and the connections *first*, when you are just starting to learn the new information, and then use non-linear active recall methods that cause you to think about the connections between the concepts, rather than just recall disparate facts. For example, it is not enough to memorize maths formulas and use them in solving math problems, you must first prove those formulas from what you already know, understand how and why they work and how they connect to other math topics, and *then* use them in practice.
Isn't encoding as described by Jason also retrieval practice of the previous concepts?