Outsmart Your Brain Daniel T. Willingham
Juan Carlos Zambrano
Gerente de Finanzas @ Tecnofarma Bolivia | Coaching ontologico
INTRODUCTION
When you’re trying to learn, your brain tells you to do the mental equivalent of push-ups on your knees. Your brain encourages you to do things that feel easy and feel like they are leading to success. That was why my students, left to their own devices, drifted toward the same ineffective study strategies. Outsmarting your brain means doing the mental exercise that feels harder but is going to bring the most benefit in the long run.
Your memory is a tool, and this book is an operating manual that will allow you to become an independent learner. I can’t promise that I’ll make learning completely effort-free. The brain just doesn’t work that way, and if anyone tells you otherwise… well, keep your hand on your wallet while they’re around.
What I can promise is much greater efficiency. I will show you how to change your approach to learning so that you can learn on your own and so that the effort you put in will have much greater impact. You’ll learn faster, and what you learn will stick with you longer. All you need to do is understand a bit about how your brain works—and about its stumbling blocks. Then you can outsmart it.
CHAPTER 1 How to Understand a Lecture
Your brain evolved to understand typical speech. In a normal conversation you don’t plan fifty minutes of remarks in advance; you say things as they occur to you, and because you’re planning only a sentence or two at a time, you’re unlikely to say something that can be understood only if your listener connects what you’re saying now to what you said twenty minutes ago. But lectures are planned and organized hierarchically. Therefore, it’s not just possible that an idea connects to something mentioned twenty minutes ago, it’s likely, and if a student misses that connection, she will miss a layer of meaning
What your brain will do: It will listen to a lecture the way you listen to a friend speaking and therefore miss deeper connections in the content
How to outsmart your brain: Plan for the mismatch between the way the speaker thinks of the content being organized (a hierarchy) and the way you experience a lecture (linearly), so that you make the connections the speaker wants you to.
In this chapter you’ll learn some tricks to ensure that you get the deeper meaning of a lecture, not just the new vocabulary words and factoids.
TIP 1 Extract the Organization from a Lecture
Ideally a speaker will be explicit about organization; she will tell you at the start of the lecture, This is what you’re going to learn. The main conclusion is X. There will be four points that support X.
But as you listen, you’re not going to appreciate every bit of the lecture organization. It moves too quickly. Aim for getting the first two levels of the hierarchy
If you’re slow to turn your attention to the speaker because you’re chatting with the person next to you or you’re on your phone, you’ll miss it. Be present and ready for the start-of-presentation summary.
Again, a good instructor will use verbal cues that explicitly say, I’ve finished defining the features of a front-porch campaign, so now I’ll give some historical examples. Ineffective instructors won’t do that, but they know they are shifting topics, even if they don’t think to tell you. So listen for verbal cues that provide clues to organization,
Look for nonverbal cues. Instructors usually stop for questions when they’ve finished covering a topic, to be sure their listeners understand it before moving on to something new
You shouldn’t try to put together the whole hierarchy while you’re listening to a lecture, but do try to interpret details in light of broader ideas.
When the instructor asks if there are any questions, don’t just ask yourself, Do I understand what she just said? Also ask yourself, Do I understand how what she just said relates to the broader topic of the day? If it’s not obvious, ask
Expect that lectures will be hierarchically organized, and try to extract the organization during the lecture.
TIP 2 Expect Listening to Require Work
People often mistakenly think that attending a lecture is easy because they’re just listening. In fact, lectures have a bad reputation among some educators because they seem passive; students just sit there. But this is inaccurate, and in the previous section we saw an important reason that learning from a lecture requires active thinking: listeners must rebuild the hierarchical organization of what they hear.
Learning by listening takes work, so come to each class with that expectation.
TIP 3 If You’re Given Notes, Use Them to Check Your Notes, Not Replace Them
Researchers have asked people that question, and they point to two functions that you’ve probably thought of: First, just writing things down makes them more memorable. Second, reading your notes later jogs your memory. Research shows that notes do serve both functions
You still want the memory benefits that come from taking your own notes. So take your own notes, even if you know you will get notes later
If you get notes or an outline before the lecture, look them over. You don’t need to spend a long time doing it. Just identify the top two levels of the hierarchical organization of the lecture
You’ll still want to coordinate your notes with the instructor’s notes later. That’s obviously your only option if the notes are available only after the lecture, but even if you get them beforehand, afterward is the time they’ll prove most useful
If the speaker provides notes or an outline, use them to aid your comprehension before or after the lecture, but don’t consider them a replacement for your own notes.
TIP 4 Be Thoughtful About When to Read Assignments
There’s often some assigned reading associated with a lecture, and you’re supposed to show up having read it. The logic read first, then listen seems obvious; you will understand the lecture better if you already know something about the topic
The key to answering the question Should I do the reading before or after the lecture? is knowing what the instructor assumes you’ve gotten out of the reading before you come to the lecture
The second time you encounter material, it’s easier to understand, whether you’re reading it or hearing it; plan your reading and listening accordingly.
TIP 5 Get Over Your Reluctance to Ask Questions
Other are reluctant to ask questions, usually because they (1) don’t want to be annoying, (2) don’t want to look stupid, or (3) are shy.
You’ll be less reluctant to ask questions if you know which ones they are.
Questions people ask just to show off are annoying
Questions that sidetrack the speaker shouldn’t be annoying but do bother some people
The type of question that never annoys others is the one you’re most likely to ask: questions of clarification. You miss a definition, so you ask for it to be repeated, or you know I said there were three reasons something is true, and you got only two of them
When you ask a question, you’re not just helping yourself. Questions provide feedback to the instructor. A half-decent teacher is always scanning faces, trying to gauge whether people look puzzled, but that goes only so far. Direct feedback is better.
It’s a skill you need to master. Everyone’s job has duties that run counter to their personality or abilities
Know which types of questions are annoying and which aren’t, and if asking the harmless type of question still makes you anxious, view it as a skill you should master
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 2 How to Take Lecture Notes
Understanding a lecture is hard, and taking notes obviously makes that hard job more difficult—it’s an added task. It’s no surprise that people don’t do it very well
It’s not that people are lazy or stupid. Taking perfect notes is literally impossible, because lectures move too quickly. People can speak about six times as quickly as they can write (120 versus 20 words per minute). Taking good notes requires making wise compromises.
Mental Processes Required to Attend a Lecture
Mental Processes Needed to Take Notes
What your brain will do: It will devote more and more attention to writing quickly in a desperate bid to keep up with the speaker. Little attention will be left for understanding the meaning of the lecture
How to outsmart your brain: Be strategic about balancing your attention to writing and your attention to understanding. The right strategy depends on the content of the lecture; decide on it in advance, if possible
This chapter will show you how to find that balance, as well as give you some other tricks to ensure that as much of your attention as possible is available to be devoted to note taking
TIP 6 Be Ready
Make sure you come with the materials you need. Bring a pen and two spares: one for you and one for the person sitting near you who didn’t bring a spare
Organize your materials. If you use a laptop, have a separate digital folder for notes. Scan paper handouts into electronic versions so everything is in the same place
Many videos about note taking on YouTube encourage you to bring highlighters or sticky notes to a lecture. The idea is to use a red pen for definitions and a blue highlighter for explanations. This sort of thing doesn’t make your notes much more useful, and it takes time and attention to switch ink colors or put sticky notes onto the middle of a page. It’s not worth it.
Though color coding is unnecessary, certainly notes are more useful if you keep them tidy. Write the date and subject at the top of the page
Attention is scarce during a presentation, so minimize the need to perform unnecessary tasks.
TIP 7 Determine in Advance Whether You Plan to Understand More or Write More
I’ve emphasized that as understanding demands more attention, the amount of information you can record in your notes will drop. Therefore, think about what you hope to learn, and consider what other resources are available to support you
So you want to consider the relative importance of understanding and of capturing details before you sit down to listen and take notes. Most of the time, understanding is going to be more important than capturing information, because the details are recorded somewhere else
Never write anything that you don’t understand. You may think to yourself, Not totally sure what she means by ‘Technology innovations are usually like a pie shell with half the filling gone,’ but I’ll figure it out later or ask someone. It’s not going to make any more sense later than it does now
The easiest strategy is to understand what the speaker is saying, then write what you’re thinking, not what the speaker said.
If a lecture is detail heavy but easy to understand, focus on recording as much as you can; if the important content is more abstract, focus on understanding and write notes sparingly, using your own words.
TIP 8 You Should Usually Take Notes Longhand
Should you take notes with paper and pen or with a laptop? First, note that this question assumes that you have a choice. Devices are sometimes forbidden and sometimes required in class, and in some settings a device just doesn’t make sense. If you do have a choice, you should again consider the relative importance of understanding versus recording a lot in your notes
A very general, very wise principle of human behavior is: Do Not Rely on Willpower if You Can Change the Environment Instead.
An alternative is to put your laptop into airplane mode. That way it’s a little harder to access online fun, and you’re more likely to stay with the presentation.
So what’s the bottom line? If the lecture is not a fact-heavy one where speed is essential, it’s best to take notes longhand. If speed is essential, use a laptop but disable your Wi-Fi before the lecture starts. And if you find yourself distracted anyway, switch to longhand.
Although the research on laptop use during presentations is inconclusive, I think the presence of the internet is so distracting that you’d be wise to take notes longhand in most circumstances
TIP 9 Evaluate Your Notes on the Spot
I’ve said that it often makes sense to write what you’re thinking (see tip 7), but you must bear in mind that future you will be reading the note. Write your notes for future you
So how do you know if your notes strike the right balance between briefness and clarity? When the instructor calls for questions, evaluate whether your notes will make sense to you later
You can also take a few moments to evaluate your notes at the end of the lecture if you don’t have to run to another appointment
Evaluate your notes as you take them, to see if they will sense to you later
TIP 10 Don’t Use a Note-Taking System
I don’t recommend that you use a note-taking system, because I don’t think they are worth the cost to attention. Using a special format for notes is just one more thing for you to think about when your mental state is in near overload most of the time.
Rather than adopting a formal system, I advocate writing notes more or less the way you’re used to doing it. That way you don’t have to think about it and can devote more attention to understanding the lecture. Use phrases and broken sentences you can understand. If it helps, imagine that you’re texting someone
Will show you how to reorganize your notes into better written form later. To facilitate that process, I recommend that you take notes on alternate pages; in other words, leave every other page blank. You’ll use the blank page to amplify your notes and reorganize them (if need be)
TIP 11 Use Note-Taking Shorthand
Figures and graphs can send you scrambling: they are complex and take a while to draw. You might consider taking a picture with your phone, but that takes time, and it’s often frowned upon in classes. If you need to copy a figure into your notes, be sure you know what the point of the figure is and write that conclusion in words
Although I don’t recommend using a formal note-taking system, it can be very useful to add comments to your notes that will help organize them later. Use the page margin for notes to yourself about your notes
Reduce the mental burden of note taking by using your own abbreviations.
TIP 12 Use Lecture Recordings Judiciously
You may fully intend to revisit a lecture later so you can supplement your notes, but you probably won’t. Watching a video or listening to audio is like attending a lecture again, and that’s a big investment of time
A lot of research has been conducted in the last ten years that compares the effectiveness of learning from a live instructor versus learning from video. Much of the research is poor, but what we have indicates that a live lecture has the advantage
Video or audio recordings lull you into thinking that you don’t need to fret about capturing a lecture in your notes, but don’t fall for that; you’re less likely to use the recording than you think.
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 3 How to Learn from Labs, Activities, and Demonstrations
Let’s start by considering the three main purposes of learning activities.
First, some activities are meant to teach you a process—that is, how to do something better
Second, you might do an activity for the experience, because doing is the best or only way to learn particular things
Finally, sometimes the doing is meant to help you understand something, especially when the thing you’re to learn is difficult to put into words
Now you can see the problem in learning from activities: the purpose is often not obvious to students
Naturally, if you’re not paying attention when there’s something to be learned, you won’t learn it
The particular way that we think about things is a key contributor to what we remember
How you think about it determines what you’ll remember later. Elsewhere I’ve described the idea this way: Memory is the residue of thought.
Where you should direct your attention is pretty clear when you’re learning by listening
What your brain will do: It will store in memory whatever you direct attention to and fail to store whatever you don’t pay attention to; when you learn by doing, there’s more than one possible target of attention
How to outsmart your brain: Decide, as strategically as you can, where you will direct your attention before the activity begins
TIP 13 Be There and Engage
If you’re to learn from an activity, you need to actually participate
In the same vein, do the prep work expected of you. If you are asked to read something in advance, to bring something to the activity, to try something out, or to practice something you’ve already done—do it
The notes you get from someone else will not be the same as those you take yourself
Activities make a nice change of pace, but remember, you’re there to learn, so come prepared and stay focused
TIP 14 If the Activity Is Brief and Offers a Surprising, Interesting Experience, It’s Probably an Analogy
When the activity is an analogy, focus on the mapping
Obviously, if you are unsure about the mapping, ask.
Another thing to keep in mind during this sort of learning activity is probably more important: don’t get distracted
A brief activity that makes you say Cool! is probably meant to illustrate some abstract idea you’ve studied, so make sure you understand how the activity explains the idea.
TIP 15 If the Activity Comes with a Script, You’re Supposed to Learn Either Skills or Concepts
What’s the purpose? One purpose is to make the learning more memorable
Other times, a scripted activity has a different purpose, namely to teach you higher-level thinking techniques
What should you focus on? The main point of an activity is either to learn a technique that requires physical practice or to engage high-level thinking strategies such as the scientific method
If you’re given step-by-step instructions, you’re probably supposed to learn either the smooth execution of the steps themselves or something very high-level and abstract that the steps illustrate—figure out which one
TIP 16 For Projects, Pick the Problem with Care, Seek Feedback Along the Way, and Reflect at the End
I have three suggestions for how to maximize your learning when undertaking this sort of project.
First, select your project based on what you want to learn, not what you want to accomplish
So you want to think about process as you choose your project: Will the process emphasize the elements you are hoping to learn about?
Second, when you are in the middle of your project, be sure you get feedback
Third, when you’ve finished the project, pull your thoughts together and reflect
Pick your project based on what you want to learn, not the product you want to produce, get feedback along the way, and take the time to reflect on the process afterward
TIP 17 When the Purpose Is the Activity Itself, Know the Difference Between Experience and Practice
How is it possible that I keep doing these things, yet I don’t improve? Simple: experience is not the same thing as practice.
Psychologists studying complex skills have developed more specific principles than Think about it in order to maximize your improvement
If the purpose of the activity is to improve your performance of the activity, simply doing it repeatedly isn’t enough; improvement requires deliberate practice.
TIP 18 If the Main Point of the Activity Is the Experience, Plan What to Observe
You can minimize the chance of that happening by developing an advance plan of what you hope to learn
If so, the assignment should influence what you observe.
If the purpose of the activity is to experience something because you cannot learn about it any other way, plan for what you will observe, because the experience may be so absorbing that you’ll otherwise take little away from it
TIP 19 Don’t Forget to Take Notes as You’re Experiencing
Take notes—during the activity if that’s possible or right afterward if not
Note taking during an activity will probably be hurried, so it’s wise to write the purpose of the activity at the top of the page
Taking notes during a learning activity may feel awkward and unnecessary, but you should do it anyway, if not during, then right afterward; the laws of forgetting aren’t suspended when you learn this way.
TIP 20 Look at Things from the Instructor’s Perspective
First, be understanding if the instructor seems preoccupied by whether or not you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing
Second, if the instructor forgets to tell you the purpose of the activity, ask politely
Third, let the instructor know whether or not you feel as though you’re learning
Conducting learning activities makes instructors nervous; you can make an activity run more smoothly if you provide feedback about how it’s going and how the instructor might help you.
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 4 How to Reorganize Your Notes
Important consequence of good organization: it makes content much easier to remember.
Organization creates links among the bits and pieces of what you’re trying to remember.
Familiar things are safe—if they have not been a threat in the past, they are unlikely to pose a threat in the future. Thus, we see no need to pay attention to the familiar
What your brain will do: It will conclude that there is no point in reviewing and reorganizing your notes because the content seems familiar
How to outsmart your brain: Ignore your brain; you know that both the information and the organization are incomplete
Reorganizing your notes doesn’t just make it easier to study; the process of reorganizing notes is itself studying
TIP 21 Find Connections Among Elements of Your Notes
Explicitly re-creating the full logical structure of the lecture is the best way to do that
It’s a good idea to draw a tree diagram rather than just think about the organization
I encourage you to think about two things as you’re trying to figure out the boxes and the lines that should make up this sort of hierarchy. First, the statements in the boxes should be specific
Second, when you build the hierarchy, be specific about why you are connecting statements. I suggest you label the lines linking the boxes; typical links would be: Provides evidence, Example, Elaboration, Cause, Logical implication
With the reorganization of your notes completed, you’ll have a bird’s-eye view of the lecture; that’s the time to consider how the lecture relates to the readings
You’ve tried to understand how the ideas of a lecture were organized as you took notes, but that effort was probably incomplete; after the lecture, draw a diagram that illustrates how the main ideas of the lecture related to one another
TIP 22 Spot Holes in Your Notes
After you’ve built a tree diagram representing the logic of the lecture, you’re in a better position to identify what’s missing from your notes
The missing information that you ought to flag falls into one of two categories: facts and connections
Be careful with sources not assigned by the instructor, because there may not be universal agreement on the facts you’re looking for.
Use the lecture organization you’ve derived to identify what your notes are missing, both facts and connections
TIP 23 Consider Note Taking to Be a Team Sport
I expect it’s obvious how a study group can be useful to improve your notes: you can compare the organization that you derived (see tip 21) to the ones that others came up with and decide whether yours can be improved. You can also fill factual gaps in your notes that you’ve identified (see tip 22)
Three to six people is a good group size
The best way to handle this issue is to address members’ responsibilities at the start
That said, don’t make this a set arrangement. In other words, don’t divide assigned work among group members, who then share their efforts
Join or organize a study group to help fill gaps in your notes and fine-tune their organization.
TIP 24 When Getting Help with Your Notes from the Instructor, Ask Focused Questions
Focused questions show that you’re doing your part to learn. Be prepared to (briefly) tell the instructor what you did understand and what pieces are missing for you
If you feel shy about asking the instructor for help in filling your note-taking gaps, come prepared to describe what you did understand; good preparation is the surest way to earn an instructor’s goodwill.
TIP 25 OPTIONAL: Make Your Notes Look Good
From a cognitive point of view, we’d predict that the act of copying itself does nothing to improve your understanding or memory
Beautifying your notes won’t help with your comprehension or memory, but if you enjoy the process or the result, there’s certainly no harm in doing so
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 5 How to Read Difficult Books
Readers are very likely to notice a word they don’t know. They are also very likely to notice if the grammar of a sentence is wrong. But they are much less likely to notice when two sentences contradict each other
Writers organize the material hierarchically, so readers often need to connect what they’re reading now to something they read a few pages ago
WHEN READING TO LEARN
What your brain will do: It will read the way you read for pleasure, because that’s familiar to you and it’s not obvious that it won’t work. You’ll read making minimal effort to coordinate ideas, trusting that the writer will make the connections explicit and easy to follow.
How to outsmart your brain: Use specialized strategies for comprehension that fit both the kind of material you’re reading and the goals you have for reading it.
TIP 26 Don’t Do What Most People Do: Just Read and Highlight
Both problems—you may not understand as well as you think and you may judge importance poorly—suggest that people don’t highlight the most important information
Please note that this advice doesn’t mean never highlight. Highlighting might be fine if you are reading about a topic you already know a lot about
Thus, highlighting is not the only flaw in the just read and highlight approach. Just read is also a bad strategy, because you shouldn’t plunge into a text without some preparation
Reading and highlighting is a poor strategy because it fails to provide a framework for understanding before you read and it leads you to decide that some material is more important than other material, even though you have little basis for that judgment
TIP 27 Use a Reading Strategy That Fits Your Goal
The solution is to set a concrete task to be completed as you read. The best known is called SQ3R, which has been around in various versions since the 1940s. SQ3R is an acronym for these steps: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review
Research confirms that using SQ3R improves comprehension, and it’s easy to see why
The one drawback to the SQ3R method is that you may slip into just reading without thinking much. Here’s a trick that might help: after you’ve posed your questions (and before you start reading), place some blank Post-it notes in the text—maybe one at the end of each section
It’s no accident that most reading strategies have two important properties in common: they get you to think about your goal for reading before you start and connect the pieces of the reading by asking big-picture questions
If these strategies seem like overkill, let me offer an alternative with just one step that may be an easy start to this kind of work. Instead of posing questions in advance, pose and try to answer questions as you’re reading, especially Why?
Again, there’s no definitive evidence that one strategy is superior to another. What the evidence shows is that using a strategy is better than not using one.
Good reading strategies prompt you to think about the content and set concrete goals for what you’re to learn before you read, and to connect ideas as you read.
TIP 28 Take Notes as You Read
Taking notes on readings serves the same functions as taking notes during a lecture: it helps keep you mentally on task, and the notes will help refresh your memory later
I would be more likely to take notes on a laptop because they are so much easier to edit than handwritten notes
If the reading includes headings and subheadings, you might write those in your notes; they can serve as a skeletal outline. As you read, complete the outline. For each subheading, write a summary and about three other statements
As you consider exactly what to record in your notes, you might think ahead to how you will use them. If you’ll later be tested, consider that there are different types of test questions
When you’ve finished reading and taking notes, you may be delighted to be through with the job. Actually, you’re not quite done. Once you’ve completed the reading, you should look over your notes to be sure you’re satisfied
Take notes on the thoughts generated by your reading strategy; doing so will help ensure that you don’t mentally drift into casual reading, and the notes will, of course, be useful for reviewing later
TIP 29 Allocate Significant Time to Reading
Let’s start by debunking a couple of common tricks meant to allow you to skip readings
First, speed reading is not a thing, Second, if the readings include learning aids such as chapter outlines, chapter previews and summaries, boldface or italicized terms, or practice test questions, don’t try to use these learning aids as a replacement for reading the text
Just as I encouraged you to recognize that listening to a lecture is hard work, so, too, is reading; be sure you schedule enough time to give it the attention and mental effort it requires
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 6 How to Study for Exams
Memory is the residue of thought and organization helps memory. Probing memory improves memory
Retrieval practice. Retrieval is a term researchers use for the process of pulling something out of memory, and the learning benefit comes, obviously, from practice in retrieving something. Retrieval practice works for all ages and all subjects, but there are two limitations you should know about
First, feedback matters. If you take a test for the purpose of learning, you should find out immediately whether or not you got each item correct. Second, retrieval practice works only for what’s tested
What your brain will do: It will seek memorization techniques that feel easy and that seem to lead to success.
How to outsmart your brain: Use techniques that yield long-lasting memory—organizing, thinking about meaning, and retrieval practice—even though they feel difficult and seem less productive in the short run
TIP 30 Avoid These Commonly Used Strategies
We can evaluate them in light of the three powerful principles of memory we’ve discussed:
Memory is the residue of thought, so thinking about meaning will help. Organization helps memory. Retrieval practice cements information in memory
So some of these strategies are good ones, but unfortunately, the least useful strategies—reading over your notes and rereading the textbook—are the most commonly used
The most commonly used strategies are ineffective for memorization.
TIP 31 Keep in Mind That Preparing to Study Is Studying
But I’m not going to say that, because by the time you try to commit things to memory, you should have already thought about meaning and organized the material.
But let me remind you of one other principle of memory, this one from the introduction: whether or not you want to learn is irrelevant. All that matters to memory is the mental work that you do, not whether you hope to learn from that mental work
The tips in chapters 1 through 5 are designed to help you thoroughly understand what you hope to learn, but in so doing they also provide an excellent start for getting content into your memory and should not be considered optional
TIP 32 Prepare a Study Guide
Step 1: Prepare. Be sure you are clear about the nature of the test Pay attention to the types of questions posed. All of this preparation should be done with your study group
Step 2: Write the study guide. You can use index cards (the traditional flash card medium) if you like or a pad of paper, posing questions on the left-hand side of the page and answers on the right
Go through the revised version of your class notes and your notes on the reading, and write questions about all of the content. Plan to learn everything in the flash card deck but nothing else. That’s how complete you want this resource to be
Your focus on the levels of organization in lectures and readings will pay off again as you write your questions. Pose questions at multiple levels of organization and between levels
It’s a good idea to pose questions in both directions. Your study guide should still include questions that prompt you to meaningfully connect facts
Step 3: Commit answers to memory. How long will it take to memorize everything in your study guide? It depends on how much information it contains, obviously, and different people find memorizing more or less difficult
Make your study guide as complete as possible so there won’t be any surprises on the exam
TIP 33 Avoid Found Materials
For one thing, found materials often aren’t very good; they contain errors and omissions
Most important, remember that writing a study guide is an excellent way to commit content to memory. That’s why I told you not to split the job of creating the study guide among the people in your study group
Don’t use study materials created by someone else; they’re often inaccurate or incomplete, and creating your own is an excellent way to study
TIP 34 Pose and Answer Meaningful Questions to Get Memories to Stick
It’s much easier to remember meaningful content than meaningless content. Make it a meaning-based question by asking Why? or How?
I don’t recommend that you do this for everything you’re supposed to remember, because it’s too time-consuming. But for material that just won’t stick, try drawing a picture
Meaningless material is hard to remember, so taking a little extra time to make it meaningful will probably be worth it.
TIP 35 Use Mnemonics for Meaningless Content Only
Mnemonics are memory tricks that help you learn something meaningless. One mnemonic technique requires that you memorize something simple, where the simple thing provides cues to the to-be-remembered content
There are many books on learning written by memory champions, and most of them emphasize the use of mnemonics, but mnemonics should really be your last resort. It’s a technique to be used onlyvwhen you cannot make information meaningful. That should happen rarely
Mnemonics help you memorize meaningless material, but they should be a last resort because it’s better to make content meaningful
TIP 36 How to Use Your Study Guide
First, cover the answers from the start
Second, it’s a good idea to speak aloud when you answer
Third, if the question has a longish answer (that is, it’s one you’ve written to prepare for essays), you might imagine that you’re teaching someone else
Fourth, even if you’re pretty sure you’ve answered correctly, look at the answer you wrote for your study guide
Finally, pose questions to yourself in random order
Quizzing yourself with your study guide is straightforward, but your time can be made a little more effective with some techniques that ensure you don’t breeze past the material but instead really think about it.
TIP 37 Don’t Worry About Your Style
Scientists have conducted lots of experiments on this subject, and the evidence shows no support for learning styles theories
There’s no scientific evidence for any learning styles theory, so don’t worry about customizing your learning to your
TIP 38 After You’ve Prepped on Your Own, Meet with Your Study Group
Although students are often encouraged to study together, research indicates that committing things to memory goes no better in a group. I think it’s easiest on group members if you meet to discuss what’s likely to be on the test, then create and memorize study guides on your own, then meet again before the test, maybe forty-eight hours before
Why meet if you’ve already written your study guide and memorized it? This is where the differing perspectives of group members can prove helpful. For this session, I would recommend that the group split into pairs and each member of a pair try to answer questions from the other person’s study guide
Meet with your study group after you’ve memorized your study guide to quiz one another; you’ll each have slightly different perspectives, which will further aid your memory
TIP 39 Remember That Cramming Usually Doesn’t Pay
Cramming works so long as you don’t care if you forget the information right after the exam. Distributed studying protects against this rapid forgetting.
One other thing you should know that’s not obvious from the experiment I’ve described: cramming feels as though it works well
Just do some distribution of practice and, if at all possible, have an overnight sleep between sessions
Cram only if you sincerely don’t care about learning for the long term; otherwise, distribute your studying into multiple sessions across days
TIP 40 To Prepare for Application Problems, Compare Examples
One strategy is to compare different examples of the principle you’re studying
The best way to improve your ability to see the general principle in a problem is to find several examples of the principle and compare them
TIP 41 To Prepare for Problem Variations, Label the Subgoals
Labeling subgoals is a good way to ensure that you think about the general principle of multistep solutions to problems
Labeling the subgoals may seem like a trivial change. But the labels facilitate two mental processes that we’ve already seen can aid learning: first, they make explicit the organization of the steps, and second, they emphasize meaning—they make clear why you’re carrying out each step.
When you learn a multistep solution to a problem, part of the solution may be specific to that one problem; to help you apply your knowledge more broadly, try labeling the subparts of the solution.
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 7 How to Judge Whether You’re Ready for an Exam
It may come as a surprise, but people can be mistaken about what they know
But people confuse performance and learning
Typically people overestimate what they know because they test their knowledge in ways that, without their realizing it, support their performance. Thus, they judge that they have learned something because their performance is good when they quiz themselves, but in fact their memory is shaky.
What your brain will do: It will confuse performance and learning. If you recite something from memory—even though you aren’t really drawing on your memory—your brain will conclude that you’ve studied enough
How to outsmart your brain: Test your knowledge without any other support to your performance. The easiest way to do that is to mimic the conditions of an exam
TIP 42 Be Clear About What It Means to Know Something
Being ready for a test means being able to explain content yourself, not just understanding it when someone else explains it.
Knowing doesn’t mean being able to understand an explanation; it means being able to explain to others
TIP 43 Rereading Leads to Overconfidence in Your Knowledge
Here we consider another reason why rereading is a bad idea: rereading misleads you into thinking, I know this. Rereading is like going to the lecture on wearable tech for the second time
To be clear, rereading is desirable for the purpose of comprehension. If you read something and didn’t understand it, give it another try. But rereading is a bad way to commit something to memory. It’s bad enough that it doesn’t help memory much, but in addition it makes you believe that your knowledge of the content is improving.
Rereading boosts familiarity, giving you a false sense that you have mastered content, but being familiar with something doesn’t mean you can recall it from memory and provide other, related information, which is exactly what you need to do for an examination.
TIP 44 Evaluate Your Preparation with the Right Type of Self-Testing
You need to ensure that you actually test your memory for the content
First, you can’t self-test for material you just finished reading. You’re not really testing your memory, because the content is still rattling around in your short-term memory—you just read it! There’s no hard-and-fast rule here, but I’d say at least thirty minutes should elapse between when you read content and when you self-test on that content.
If you write a comprehensive question-and-answer study guide and study by testing yourself, you will get good information along the way regarding how much you know.
To assess whether you really know something, you should test yourself when you haven’t seen the content recently and say the answers aloud—a practice that pairs easily with the method I suggested you use to memorize your study guide.
TIP 45 Don’t Use Practice Tests to Judge Your Readiness for an Exam
There are a couple of reasons you shouldn’t use previous tests to evaluate your readiness. First, last year’s test probably doesn’t exactly reflect this year’s content
You should judge whether you’re ready for the test based on how well you know everything. If you take an old test to decide if you’re ready, you are judging your readiness on just a fraction of the content to be learned. You’re throwing an element of chance into your preparation when you don’t have to.
It’s smart to look at old tests to get a sense of the types of questions that an instructor tends to ask. But don’t use old tests to measure whether you’ve done enough studying
Use old exams to get a sense of the types of questions that might be posed, not to judge whether or not you have done enough studying.
TIP 46 Study Until You Know It; Then Keep Studying.
The only way to address the problem is to anticipate forgetting. You need to study until you know it, and then keep studying. This practice, called overlearning, has been examined extensively in laboratory experiments, and there are two things you should know about the research. First, overlearning works, just as you would expect it to. It protects against forgetting. Second, while you’re doing it, it feels as though it’s not working. It feels pointless, even foolish, to keep studying after you know something. You’re going through your flash card deck and getting every answer right, so you can’t help but wonder, What good is this doing? What it’s doing is strengthening the memories to shield them from forgetting
Don’t study until you know the content and then stop; keep studying a little longer to protect against the forgetting that will happen during the time between when you stop studying and when you take the test
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 8 How to Take Tests
Exams require two things: that you recall information from memory and that you do something with that information
These are commonly called test-taking strategies, but they often go wrong. They prompt students to interpret questions as having subtle meanings other than what’s plainly asked. Or students try to eliminate answers to a multiple-choice question based on supposedly helpful tricks such as Answers containing the word ‘always’ or ‘never’ are usually wrong.
What your brain will do: It may believe that if you know something, each attempt to retrieve the memory will be successful. Actually, working at remembering something can pay off. But instead of trying to squeeze more out of memory, people apply ineffective strategies to the content that comes out of memory easily.
How to outsmart your brain: Don’t give up on your memory if it doesn’t provide the desired answer right away. Test-taking strategies should be your very last resort
TIP 47 Prepare and Take Care
Routine 1: Spend the first thirty seconds or so reading the instructions, if any are provided
Routine 2: Spend the second thirty seconds skimming the test to get a sense of how much time you can spend on each question
Routine 3: Read. Each question. Carefully
Routine 4: In the last few minutes, check your work
A small set of routines to help with planning and attention to your work will ensure that you don’t lose points due to carelessness.
TIP 48 Learn to Cope with Ordinary Test Anxiety
Try reducing your consumption of caffeinated drinks on exam day and see if that helps.
Some people are made anxious by the presence of other test takers—just seeing someone else nervously jiggling his foot or, worse, confidently racing through the exam sets some people’s hearts racing. If you’re one of those, try isolating yourself
Some people calm their anxiety by venting about how anxious they are or how high the stakes are for this exam; it makes them feel better, but it can be terrible to listen to, so you might avoid chatting with other test takers right before the exam
Some people like to meditate or pray before an exam to calm their mind and feel centered, and it’s a good strategy to try if you start to panic during an exam
Sometimes it’s hard to relax because your thoughts are running away from you. Some realistic self-talk after this breathing exercise might help
If visualizing success works for you, great, but if it doesn’t, here’s an alternative: visualize someone supportive being with you
You can combat mild test anxiety by avoiding situations that make you anxious during the test and by using self-calming techniques when you feel stressed.
TIP 49 Imagine Yourself in the Place Where You Studied
Changing locations doesn’t have a huge effect on memory
Nevertheless, the environment can still creep into your memory even if you don’t consciously include it in your studying. To use this possibility to your advantage, if you’re in a test and are having trouble recalling something, try visualizing the place where you studied it. Imagine yourself in that location. If there were characteristic sounds or smells there, put those into your imagining as well. This visualization may help you recover the lost memory.
If you’re having trouble recalling a fact you’ve studied, try visualizing the place where you studied it
TIP 50 If You Can’t Remember a Fact, Think About Themes
Memories tend to be organized in themes, or clumps, and they can be retrieved that way
If you’re having a hard time figuring out which part of what you’ve learned is relevant to a question, list the topics you’ve learned on a piece of scrap paper or the margin of the test
Some test questions provide only very general cues to memory, and you may not consider one or more broad course topics that are relevant while you’re formulating an answer; in that case, list the themes of the material you’ve covered to be sure you consider all the content that might be pertinent to a question
TIP 51 Keep Trying
People remember a little more each time they attempt to remember.
When taking a test, for each question, try to remember the answer for thirty seconds or so. If that doesn’t do it, mark the question and come back to it in five or ten minutes. Keep at it until you run out of time or finish the test
If you can’t remember a fact, come back to the question in five or ten minutes. Don’t assume that your first instinct or your second guess is more likely to be correct; trust your confidence in which answer is the right one
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TIP 52 Beware of Pop Knowledge
Pop knowledge. When a question makes a certain piece of information pop into your mind, you must evaluate whether it actually answers the question.
When you’ve prepared well, some ideas will be strongly associated, and when you see idea A, idea B will immediately come to mind, but that doesn’t mean idea B is the answer
TIP 53 Ask the Instructor for Clarification, but Show What You Know
Other times, the instructor has simply written a poorly phrased question. If a question confuses you, you might ask the instructor about it
You’re more likely to get a good response from the instructor if you offer reassurance that that’s not your game. The way to do that is to explain your confusion
If you’re confused by the phrasing of a question, ask the instructor to clarify, but be specific about your confusion and specify what you do understand as a way of reassuring the instructor
that you’re really looking for clarification of the question, not hints to the answer.
TIP 54 Don’t Overthink
You will often add assumptions to the question and/or read things into it that are not there
Avoid answers that say something is ‘always true’ or ‘never true’ or If something is stated positively in one choice and negatively in another, the positive choice is usually right. SAT tricks are your last resort
If you don’t know the answer, you need to spend more time on the question
Test-taking strategies that are supposed to guide you to the correct answer if you don’t know the content don’t work, and they often make you second-guess yourself
TIP 55 For an Essay Question, Don’t Start Writing Until You Know How the Essay Ends
Step 1: On scratch paper, list everything you think should be part of the essay
To organize all the facts you list and to be sure that you include relevant facts in your answer, sort them by subquestions
Step 2: On scratch paper, write an outline. From step 1 you have a bunch of facts, and you’ve started to connect them by considering which part of the question they are relevant to and the hierarchical organization of these facts
Don’t start writing until you know how the essay will end.
Step 3: Write. If you write an outline that you’re happy with, you don’t have to think about the answer to the question anymore—that’s in your outline
Essays require a lot of on-the-spot thinking, so use a three-step plan to put together an organized essay in a hurry
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 9 How to Learn from Past Exams
Suppose you take a test and it goes poorly. Clearly something about the way you prepare must change, but what? Most people conclude, I need to study more. That isn’t helpful because it isn’t specific.
What your brain will do: It will make a snap diagnosis about why you failed: I needed to study more.
How to outsmart your brain: Overcome the impulse to turn away from failed work, and analyze what went wrong. That analysis can direct your effort for the next exam.
TIP 56 Categorize Your Mistakes
Figuring out what went wrong on an exam means analyzing the questions you couldn’t answer. Start by flagging those, but also flag the ones on which you guessed and got lucky. You couldn’t answer those, either
First, you can analyze the content of the questions you got wrong. The most obvious way to do that is by subject matter
Second, analyze what went through your head when you saw each question you got wrong on the test. Here are eight common thoughts people have when they review questions they got wrong, along with what each thought probably means
If your mistakes tend to fall into one or two categories, great; you have a good idea of what to work on
Analyze the reasons you got questions wrong by considering what you were thinking when you tried to answer them; that will tell you which step went wrong when you prepared for and then took the exam.
TIP 57 Analyze What Went Wrong on Essay Questions
You should also consider what sorts of essays you were asked to write. Two types of questions dominate essay exams. Some ask you to elaborate on and explain content
In the second type of essay question, you’re asked to evaluate something new: a conclusion, perhaps, or a hypothetical situation. There are a few ways your answer to this sort of question can go wrong.
First, the instructor might have a particular answer in mind, and you just don’t see it
The second way this sort of essay can go wrong: you may be on the right mental track, but you end up writing a poor essay because it doesn’t make an argument, it’s unorganized, or you don’t use transitions well, so the instructor can’t see how the whole thing hangs together. You’ve got a lot of the right facts in your essay, but you don’t put them together so that they build something larger
A third possibility is that you do remember the relevant content and you include it, but you clutter your essay with a bunch of irrelevant stuff.
A fourth possibility is that your essay is good, but it’s a mediocre fit to what the question asked
Even if the grader provides very little feedback regarding why you earned the grade you did on an essay question, if you know the typical ways that essay questions go wrong, you can figure out why you scored poorly, and you’ll know how to improve next time.
TIP 58 See Trick Questions for What They Are
I think that trick questions on exams are actually quite rare
When a question looks tricky, the problem usually lies in the student’s knowledge of the content, not in the wording of the question
Questions can also seem tricky because pop knowledge doesn’t work
Most of the time that you find a question tricky or confusing, it’s because your knowledge of the content isn’t quite deep enough.
TIP 59 Think About What Went Right
The fact that you seek out information about what went wrong on a test shouldn’t mean that you don’t acknowledge and appreciate what went right. You learned something, even if you didn’t do your best and even if you’re disappointed with your grade. Give yourself credit for the work accomplished
You should also analyze the questions you got right, to figure out what you should keep doing.
Analyzing the questions you got right may also refine your sense of what you need to work on
Pay attention to what you got right, both because it will make you feel more encouraged and because it will help you refine your understanding of what you need to work on
TIP 60 Don’t Cringe
But the other factor—what you know—is easily changed. Learning more information makes you more intelligent. Learning can be discouraging, though, because the people who are good at the mental-speed part are better than the rest of us when we take on a new task
You can get smarter in any subject you want to. You just need to learn the subject
Part of working hard in school is figuring out what you don’t do well so you can focus your energy where it’s needed. The person who gets all As is the person who is not afraid to learn from their mistakes. Going over exam mistakes may make you feel dumb, but you’re actually doing what smart people do. You should remind yourself of that
You may think that successful don’t make many mistakes; they do, but what separates them form unsuccessful learners is their willingness to face their mistakes and learn from them.
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 10 How to Plan Your Work
Remembering to do things calls on prospective memory; that’s what it’s called when you form an intention to do something in the future and then later remember to do it. It’s the type of memory you rely on when you notice that you’re low on gas in the morning and think, I should buy gas on the way home tonight
Prospective memory can fail, of course—you forget to buy gas or take your pill when you planned—but the solution seems obvious: don’t rely on memory. Instead, set up a reminder to prompt the action at the right time
People consistently underestimate how long it will take to get things done. This is called the planning fallacy.
What your brain will do: It will not allocate enough time to complete scheduled work, and it will forget that you’ve planned that work.
How to outsmart your brain: Establish a small set of simple habits to make sure you know what work you’re expected to complete and by when
Scheduling becomes greatly simplified when, instead of planning time to work on each project, you plan to work for a consistent amount of time each day
TIP 61 Get Enough Sleep
Yet sleep has a direct effect on your cognitive performance. It’s easy to appreciate that sleep loss makes it both harder to think and harder to pay attention
Thus, losing sleep disrupts what you learned the previous day.
Here are some methods of changing the external cues.
Sleep directly affects learning, and although many people are frustrated by their inability to sleep as long as they want to, there are steps you can take to help you get more sleep
TIP 62 Plan a Block of Consistent, Dedicated Time for Learning
A better strategy is to plan your learning by time, not by task. In other words, plan a block of time each day that is dedicated to learning
You should do some studying for the quiz even though your work time is supposed to be over. More important, you should increase your daily study time, perhaps by fifteen or even thirty minutes. Yes, even though it was inadequate just this once. You will never regret being ahead on your work. This is your insurance policy against the planning fallacy
Instead of planning your work assignment by assignment, make a habit of working a set number of hours each day
TIP 63 Use a Calendar
Principle 1: Have your calendar with you all the time
Principle 2: Write commitments in your calendar immediately
These early reminders of upcoming deadlines are crucial; they will help you avoid the planning fallacy
Don’t neglect to put scheduled social events onto your calendar
If you’re not already using a calendar, you must start; it’s essential to managing your time and setting priorities for learning.
TIP 64 Make a To-Do List for Each Study Session
This set of steps makes writing a to-do list look like a bigger deal than it really is. It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, and in the end it will save you time because you always know what you should do next.
This isn’t a list of things to do today. It’s a ranking, by importance, of tasks
A to-do list encourages you by showing you what you’ve accomplished. For that reason, review your to-do list at the end of every work session. Make it a little ritual to take some well-deserved pride in all that you achieved
Creating a to-do list for each work session will help keep you focused, reassure you that you’re working on what’s most important, and show you what you’ve accomplished
TIP 65 Set and Revisit Your Learning Goals
Without reflection and planning, you may miss important opportunities
So keep a list of your long-term goals
In addition to your goals, jot down what you need to learn to achieve them
Then write down one or two specific steps you might take to lead you closer to your goals: talking with an expert, perhaps, reading a relevant book, or taking an online course
In addition to flexibility, put a good dash of skepticism into your planning
Supplement what you find online by talking with people who actually have the job you’re aiming for
Revisit your list of goals every six months or so.
Research shows that people who monitor their progress are more likely to achieve their goals
Set long-term learning goals related to your career aspirations, and revisit them every six months to see how you’re progressing and whether they should be adjusted.
TIP 66 Set Goals with the Hidden Factors in Mind
First, Follow your passion is slightly off. Follow your purpose would be better
In short, your environment can be supportive, neutral, or toxic to your goals, even if the people around you are unaware of your plans.
Third, people tend to underestimate how much their emotions can cloud their calculations. Even if you think that passion should be more important than I have allowed, you still want your goal setting to be realistic
To be sure that emotions are not preventing you from thinking clearly about your own life goals, try giving yourself advice as though you were someone else. Talk about yourself in the third person and describe, aloud, the situation that you’re in: Well, Dan, you’d like to apply to transfer from the School of Engineering to the School of Education so that you can become a high school physics teacher
When considering long-term career goals, be sure that they will contribute to a sense of purpose, recognize how your surroundings will affect your ability to achieve them, and be sure that emotions have not influenced the goals you set.
TIP 67 Develop a Plan
Researchers have discovered a couple of ways you can make it more likely that you’ll follow through
To begin with, make your plan even more specific
In addition, have a plan B
These contingency plans are for external obstacles, but it’s even more important to plan for internal obstacles, things about yourself that may prevent you from following through
Research indicates that it’s helpful to make your plan in an if-then form.
You can increase the chances that you will pursue your goals by planning the specific next steps to take, anticipating obstacles (internal or external) that might prevent you from taking those steps, and creating an action plan to be taken if an obstacle arises.
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 11 How to Defeat Procrastination
Procrastination is challenging to avoid, but the psychology behind it is not complicated. We procrastinate to make ourselves feel better; we put off an unpleasant activity (for example, doing a math problem set) in favor of a pleasant activity
But the problem is a little worse than it first appears because pleasure or pain that we’re contemplating in the future doesn’t have the same power as pleasure or pain now
Impulse control also plays a role. An impulse is a plan your brain creates that meets an immediate desire but has bad consequences in the long run
To reduce procrastination, we can focus on (1) making work seem more favorable compared to the alternative and/or (2) reducing the chances that we will act on impulse.
What your brain will do: It will judge that the work you need to do will be unpleasant but less so later; further, an alternative to the work seems very attractive now but will be less attractive later. So work is put off, and the fun alternative is selected
How to outsmart your brain: Make work seem less disagreeable, and make the tempting alternatives to work seem a bit less fun; it’s all in how you talk to yourself about them.
As we’ll see in this chapter, your ultimate goal is to defeat procrastination by making work a habit. If you sit down to your daily work session as automatically as you brush your teeth before you go to bed, you won’t procrastinate—you’ve eliminated the possibility of choosing not to work because you’re not making a choice
TIP 68 Don’t Rely on Willpower to Reduce Procrastination, Rely on Habit
When sitting down to a work session becomes habitual, there’s no chance of procrastinating, because you’re not making a choice.
How can you make an action into a habit? As you’ve probably guessed, consistent repetition is the answer, but if you ensure that the repetition has a few key features, the habit will develop more quickly
First, it’s easier to establish a habit as a sequence of things you do rather than at particular times. Habits are like memories in that they are cued
Finishing one action in your shower routine cues the next one. Time is a bad cue because you don’t monitor time that closely. In contrast, completing an action is obvious to you—it’s hard to miss that you’ve just rinsed your hair.
Another way to speed the development of a habit is to choose the context wisely. Schedule your consistent time for studying in a part of your day when you can be consistent
Making your work session habitual is the ultimate way to defeat procrastination because it removes the need to choose to work.
TIP 69 Each To-Do List Item Should Be Concrete and Take Twenty to Sixty Minutes
When eating an elephant, take one bite at a time. —Unknown
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. —Chinese proverb
One day at a time. —Alcoholics Anonymous slogan
Tip 64 suggested that you write a to-do list at the start of each study session. Each item on your to-do list should be a small bite—shoot for twenty to sixty minutes. Many learning tasks do not come in small bites, obviously. You need to disassemble them into parts, but you may not know how to. If you don’t know what the pieces should be, make that an item on your to-do list. It’s work, and it might take a while, so write, Figure out plan for economics class project.
Some tasks are best thought of in phases or steps, with each phase depending on the outcome of the previous phase
Other tasks are ordered not in sequenced steps but rather in categories. That’s the breakdown
Other tasks break down naturally into parts; the task is really one giant thing to do, but you create artificial pieces to make it more manageable
Make each to-do list item doable—between twenty and sixty minutes long—because procrastination will be less tempting if tasks look achievable
TIP 70 Reframe Your Choice
Redescribing your choice may also make work seem more appealing. To see how this strategy works, we’ll use an idea economists call opportunity cost. It basically means giving up the chance of a potential gain
The next time you are tempted to procrastinate, try describing the choice to yourself in a way that highlights the opportunity cost
If you notice that either the process or the goal is the part of the task that makes you procrastinate, see if you can focus on the part of the task you don’t mind doing so much
Redescribing the work ahead—the outcome of the work, the process, or the goal—might make the right choice more appealing.
TIP 71 Just Start, and You’ll See That It’s Not That Bad
People are surprisingly poor at predicting their emotional reactions
You may find that the same is true of mental tasks. If you can just get yourself started, you’ll see that working really isn’t as unpleasant as you thought it was going to be
If you’re having a terrible time getting yourself to sit down and work, try telling yourself, I’ll make my to-do list for today. If, after I make my list, I want to take a break, I’ll take a break
Starting a work session will seem less odious if you give yourself permission to take a break after a short time
TIP 72 Tell Others What You’re Up To
Shame is a key reason that accountability works. You feel embarrassed if you’ve told people
In addition to holding you accountable, friends can provide positive support. Depending on the circumstances, we might need one form of support more than another. Psychologists list four types: Emotional support, Informational support, Practical support, Appraisal support.
But after those folks are ruled out, look at these different types of support, and think a bit about which of your friends are most able and willing to provide the type of support you need
Your social network may provide emotional support and practical help in your effort to procrastinate less, but to do so, people must know that you’re working on it and what sort of help you need.
TIP 73 Consider Whether Your Procrastination Is a Way to Self-Handicap
Psychologists call this self-handicapping: we impose a handicap on ourselves so that we have an excuse for our failure
Procrastination makes it easy to self-handicap but deny what you’re up to
What could it be?
The answer, of course, is stupidity. In tip 60 I mentioned that many people believe that intelligence is largely genetic and largely unchangeable.
These beliefs about intelligence are false
Teaching yourself to learn is not easy. Over the course of reading this book, you’ve seen that there are a lot of components you have to get right
Some people procrastinate as a form of self-handicapping, so that they have an excuse if a test or project goes poorly
TIP 74 Make the Temptation a Reward
This strategy should be your last resort: compromise between the work you must do and an alternative activity that tempts you. Do some of each by making the tempting activity a reward for working
This strategy might be especially effective when you judge that the thing that tempts you to procrastinate is time sensitive. To put it more colloquially, FOMO is involved. FOMO stands for fear of missing out, but here I’ll expand the term to mean a more general feeling of missing out.
Protecting time for important social events will reduce your procrastination
Can do a bit of the fun activity as a periodic reward for working
If an activity is so tempting that it will make you skip your work session altogether, make that activity a reward for work completed.
TIP 75 Track Your Progress but Ignore Your Streaks
It’s easy to keep track if you make a tick mark on your calendar for each day worked
There are two reasons why showing up every day matters. First, even when you foresee an unproductive day and you’re right, something is much more than nothing. You’re still making progress. Second, and more important, you are showing yourself that the work matters to you
You draw the same conclusion when you see yourself work consistently. Noting that you have met your work commitment builds your self-image as a learner
Be consistent, but don’t prize streaks
Taking note of the consistency of your work habits will be motivating and help to maintain them, but don’t be fixated on streaks, because streaks are inevitably broken (and should be!); a broken streak will needlessly discourage you.
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 12 How to Stay Focused
The psychologists Angela Duckworth and James Gross have described four mental steps that apply to distraction: first, the student arranges her situation for studying and it includes her phone; second, the student shifts her attention from studying to her phone when it pings; third, she evaluates the notification as important; and fourth, she responds by going on Snapchat
Note that each change sounds harder than the previous one. It’s relatively easy to turn your phone to silent for an hour but much harder to keep yourself off Snapchat once you decide that your unfinished Snapstreak is important
I’ve described the loss of focus caused by distraction from the environment. You can also lose focus due to mind wandering, a term scientists use just as you do
What your brain will do: It will direct your attention away from work when new information appears in the environment (distraction) or it will spontaneously redirect your attention to thoughts other than work (mind wandering).
How to outsmart your brain: To limit distraction, the easiest fix is to change your surroundings. Defeating mind wandering is harder, and the best strategy may be to accept its inevitability and to return promptly to the work at hand.
TIP 76 Choose Your Work Location with Care
The characteristic you’re after in a study space is pretty obvious: find the place that is closest to being distraction free.
You may benefit from being around other people who are also working. We are a social species, and we tend to feel and do what others around us are feeling and doing. It’s called social contagion: if everyone around me is laughing, fearful, exercising, or studying, I will likely share those feelings or do those activities. Studying in the library meant being surrounded by other people working hard, and that inspired me
In addition to where you work, give thought to when you work. Some people work best while others sleep, because a lot of distractions retire when people do
Don’t be unrealistically optimistic about situations in which you think you can work effectively. You may think you’ll get work done while you’re babysitting an infant
The injunction Pick a quiet place to work is mostly right, but it’s too simple; you should think about the best time, too, and about the possibility that other people may energize you, not distract you.
TIP 77 Improve Your Work Location
Let’s start with distractions in a classroom or lecture hall. You should try to sit in the front row or near it. That way, there is less chance that someone in front of you will do something distracting, both because there are fewer rows of people in front of you and because people who sit near the front tend to be more serious about paying attention
So you should change seats if you can. If that’s not possible, at least try to shift your body in your seat to make the screen harder to see
Suppose a friend keeps talking to you during the lecture. It’s awkward to move or to tell them to be quiet. Tell them that you’re having a hard time catching everything and see if that helps
You face different distractions when you’re working in a public place like a library or coffee shop. If the problem is just noise, try wearing foam earplugs
If you add noise-canceling headphones, that should seal the deal
But the greatest source of distraction may be electronic, not human. When I work on my computer, if I can see open tabs, documents, or folders, I will think of other work to be done or fun websites to visit. If you use full-screen mode, you can see only what you’re trying to focus on.
if you turn your phone off, it’s better than setting it to silent; you will be less tempted to take a quick peek to see if you’ve gotten any messages. Schedule periodic check-ins during work sessions.
If you think you can be (or need to be) a little more intense about limiting your access to distracting digital content, you can install a screen-time limitation app that does it for you
If that approach seems too extreme, here are two other ways to limit your off-task time. First, you can install a screen-monitoring app that measures how much time you spend using different apps over the course of a week. Second, you might turn off auto-login for social media apps
You might also turn off alerts for some apps
If a situation has something distracting in it, you can remove the distractor or make it less noticeable; if it’s a distractor you seek out, you can make it harder to access
TIP 78 Don’t Choose Distraction
People are terrible at doing two things at once. Much—perhaps most—of the distraction people suffer is self-imposed. They just don’t realize what they’re doing to themselves. Anytime you multitask, you are distracting yourself.
The results for video content are really clear: if a video plays, work suffers in time, accuracy, or both. That’s true even when people feel as though they are ignoring it and it’s just background noise.
Music, however, is more complicated. Researchers have tried all the variations you would probably think of: music with lyrics versus instrumental, classical versus pop, and so on. None seems to make much difference. Music sometimes helps academic tasks and sometimes hurts, because it has two conflicting effects: it’s distracting, but it also has the potential to energize listeners
Since these tend to affect your performance negatively, rather than seeking a boost by multitasking, get your emotional lift during rest breaks
Don’t multitask; you can’t truly share attention between tasks, so adding a second task always compromises the first.
TIP 79 Rethink Your Evaluation
One strategy you could try is to interrupt that automatic act and consider it. Think or, better yet, say aloud, What are the odds that this notification is really important?
You can try a technique I’ve suggested in a couple of other circumstances in which emotions cause a problem: psychological distancing. Think to yourself—or again, better, say aloud—what you think you ought to do, but talk about yourself in the third person
If you’re distracted by something such as your phone, you can try reevaluating the importance of the distraction; for mind wandering, the best strategy is to talk about your situation and the desirable evaluation of the situation in the third person
TIP 80 Test Whether You Want Social Media or Enjoy It
Suppose you really love your phone but you keep it silenced when you work. When break time comes, checking social media is a reward, of course. But even more, you find that not being able to check during the work period is a punishment; it’s hard to think of anything else
But hold on. I just said, checking social media is a reward, of course. Did you immediately accept that as true? When you can’t check your social media feed for a while, checking it may feel really urgent—you want to check it
Wanting and enjoying are not the same thing
When you feel the compulsion to check your phone, try some self-talk
If you feel addicted to your phone, try an experiment to test whether your habit is really something you enjoy or is just something you want.
TIP 81 Chew Gum
The evidence for this tip is not as strong as that for others, but there’s some reason to think that chewing sugar-free gum might help you concentrate
Chewing gum may help you focus your attention and stick with a task, but the research findings on this effect are mixed
TIP 82 Fight Chronic Mind Wandering
Mind wandering has been studied for only about fifteen years, and attempts to control it are still in their infancy. Still, I can offer a few ideas that you might find helpful
First, don’t do it on purpose! Researchers study mind wandering in students by texting them during a lecture at random intervals
A second strategy applies to mind wandering during reading. A couple of research groups have tested whether people stay better focused on a text if they read it aloud
Laying out what you’re going to do may make it less likely that your mind will drift away from work
Set your phone to chime every ten minutes as a mental check-in to bring yourself back to work if you’ve drifted off.
Reducing mind wandering has been studied very little, but you can try reading aloud, using a to-do list, setting a reminder chime for every ten minutes or so, and avoiding mind wander on purpose!
TIP 83 Make Yourself Less Susceptible to Mind Wandering
I’ve offered ideas about fighting mind wandering during a work session. Is there anything you can do to make yourself generally less vulnerable to mind wandering? To change your cognitive system so you stay on task more often?
There are training regimens that promoters claim will boost your powers of concentration. Usually the training requires you to play games for some minutes each day. (I put games in quotation marks because they are not very much fun.) The games tax your ability to concentrate and mentally manipulate information. The hope is that with practice, those skills will improve
There’s no mental training program that reduces mind wandering
Mind wandering is more likely if you are hungry or sleepy, so you should eat well and get enough sleep
Early research showed that the minds of people who meditate regularly wander less than the minds of nonmeditators do.
To make yourself less susceptible to mind wandering, eat well, sleep enough, and engage in mindfulness meditation
TIP 84 Plan Breaks, Take Breaks
You will not be surprised to learn that rest breaks make you less susceptible to distractions and mind wandering
But there’s no research basis for the timing and duration of breaks. So try the Pomodoro technique for a start, but don’t feel as though you can’t change the time values.
You can also consider scheduling breaks by task, not by time.
Whether by time or by task, I suggest you plan your breaks. In other words, don’t sit down figuring, I’ll work until I need a break.
There’s no evidence that you’re better off doing any one of these four activities than another during your break.
Rest breaks help you concentrate, and there are no firm rules about their precise timing, nor what you should do during them.
TIP 85 Regroup or Move Along
Not long ago I was trying to think of an opening for a talk I was writing about technology and reading. I couldn’t think of anything, so I started aimlessly casting around Google, hoping for inspiration. Predictably, I found nothing useful and started reading stuff unrelated to work. Then I got mad, told myself, I need to think, and two minutes later my mind was wandering.
Regroup: evaluate the task I’ve undertaken and the methods I’m using. Why am I making no progress? What am I trying to do? What have I tried? What’s gone wrong? Maybe I don’t need a clever opening for a talk on reading and technology; after all, educators are already interested in the topic. Or maybe I should have an opening but I should ignore Google and reflect on my own digital reading habits or those of my kids
If regrouping doesn’t work, consider moving along. I could work on the rest of the talk and return later to the nut I can’t crack. Perhaps the fresh perspective will bring fresh ideas
We are especially susceptible to distraction when we work on a problem without making progress, so when you feel that happening, you can either regroup by trying a fresh approach to the problem or set the problem aside temporarily and work on something else.
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 13 How to Gain Self-Confidence as a Learner
A lack of self-confidence matters, because it affects your academic success. For one, it shapes how you interpret setbacks
Your self-confidence also affects your aspirations
Your self-confidence as a learner comes from your academic self-image: Do you see yourself as someone who learns easily or someone who struggles? Unsurprisingly, your self-image is shaped, in part, by grades and other feedback you’ve received over the years, but three other factors matter, too: who your friends are, who you compare yourself to, and the family values you grew up with
What your brain will do: It will construct an academic self-image based partly on your prior learning success but also on relationships, who you compare yourself to, and your values; this self-image determines your self-confidence.
How to outsmart your brain: Take steps to change your academic self-image once you know the factors that contribute to it
To get started, I’ll ask you to reflect a bit on the four contributors to academic self-image:
TIP 86 Rethink What It Means to Be a Learner
Most people develop their idea of a good learner at school
The early elementary school years are formative, so once you develop this concept of a good learner, it’s hard to shake. But it’s limited in two ways
First, it puts a premium on speed
Second, this description of a good learner makes it a characteristic intrinsic to the person, something they just are, like brown-eyed or sixty-eight inches tall. But as you’ve seen in this book, learning is effective because of what you do, not who you are. If you’ve had trouble learning in the past, it’s not because you’re not a learner. Maybe you’re slower than others, but anyone who does the right things to learn is a learner. It’s really part of your birthright as a human
Does that seem a little overstated? Think about what you’ve learned outside of school
And once you’re no longer a student, the measure of success will be different, so you shouldn’t assume that your experience will be the same as it was in school
Once you’re outside school, you don’t need to be great at learning; you need to be okay at it but also achieve proficiency in other skills.
If you’re thinking, I’ve never been a good learner, ask yourself whether you really need to be great at learning or whether being pretty good at learning, combined with some other skills, will yield a first-rate combination. If you use the strategies in this book, being pretty good at learning will surely be within your reach
Remember that learning is something you do, not something you are, and that the definition of successful learning changes once you’re out of school; you need to be good at several things, not excellent at one
TIP 87 Be Around Other Learners
If you care about learning and the people in your social group don’t, there’s a part of your life in which you feel a little lonely. We like to affiliate with people like ourselves
Obviously, you shouldn’t drop friends who aren’t interested in learning, but you might add some who are
We are social beings, and we are influenced by what our friends and family do; being around at least a few other people who care about learning will make it easier for you to express that side of yourself.
TIP 88 Compare Yourself to Yourself
The comparisons that affect your self-image are not just the ones that your friends make; you pick people to compare yourself to. Your self-image can vary widely depending on your selections, and there’s no good way to know which comparisons make sense
Rather than shooting for clever comparisons, compare yourself to yourself. That means tracking your goals and your progress in meeting them. I’ve already suggested that you do this (see tip 65), so I’m not proposing any extra work; rather, it’s an extra use to which you can put your recorded goals.
It’s natural to compare yourself to others, and comparisons contribute to your self-image, but they are seldom helpful; compare your present self to your past self when evaluating your progress.
TIP 89 If You Didn’t Get Practical Learning Advice from Your Family, Get It from Others
Children raised in families that value learning tend to do well in school. They take more challenging courses, earn higher grades, and are more likely to graduate from high school and continue on to college.
Parents who themselves felt comfortable at school often have some knowledge about how to succeed there
What should you do if your parents don’t have that knowledge? In high school, your teachers can help
Every school has an administrative arm designed to help students understand the system
Some children gained self-confidence as learners and practical advice about school from their parents, but people who didn’t can gain those things from other sources
Summary for Instructors
CHAPTER 14 How to Cope with Anxiety
Anxiety goes from helpful to damaging when you habitually spend time and mental energy checking the environment for threats that aren’t there. The spider-phobic thoroughly scans any room before entering to be sure the coast is clear and then keeps scanning it once he’s there. That consumes attention and makes it hard to hold a conversation or even think. And anxiety can affect behavior as well as thinking. The spider-phobic might refuse to enter his own living room because he has seen spiders there before
There’s little doubt that a moderate proportion—perhaps a third—can be assigned to our genes. That doesn’t mean your DNA determines Thou shalt be anxious as inevitably as your eyes are destined to have a particular color. It means that you have a predisposition to the kind of vigilance, the watchfulness that easily blooms into anxiety. But what prompts it to grow?
There are two theories. One suggests that anxiety is a product of the same type of learning observed with Pavlov’s dog. You ring a bell, then feed the dog. Repeat that enough times, and the dog expects to be fed when it hears the bell and therefore salivates
The same process can make you anxious about learning
Another theory helps us understand how anxiety can get out of control. The feeling of anxiety is so unpleasant that you always have your feelers out, so to speak, monitoring the environment for the thing you find threatening
It appears that a person’s interpretation of events is crucial. You’re much more likely to feel anxious about math if you think a failed test tells you something important and unchangeable about yourself. If math is unimportant to you, a bad test score doesn’t make you anxious
When we turn our attention to reducing anxiety, two things become clear. First, given that your interpretation of events matters more than what actually happens, it would seem that the main thing we need to do is give you a better way to think about what happens. Second, we shouldn’t expect anxiety to go away quickly. Even with a better way to think about events, people need to unlearn their old associations and ways of thinking
What your brain will do: It will scan your surroundings for threats and continue to do so even if nothing threatening is observed. This scanning will heighten your anxiety in an upward spiral and will occupy your mind, making it difficult to focus on learning.
How to outsmart your brain: Focus on reinterpreting your thoughts to manage your anxiety
TIP 90 Evaluate Progress as Any Improvement in Doing What You Want to Do
Consistent with your goal of managing anxiety, not eliminating it, define success as doing what you want to do, even if it makes you anxious
At this point you may be snorting Some tip! ‘Ignore your terror and just do it.’ Well, yes. Feeling anxious is uncomfortable, but it’s not dangerous. That’s hard to remember when your heart is pounding and your palms are sweaty—your body is telling you quite clearly, There’s a problem here! But in calmer moments you know that everything is actually fine and you can’t be harmed. You can push through. You may be very uncomfortable, but you’re not in danger
Count as a success doing a little of what you want to do.
You should evaluate whether the strategies you use are working, and the right definition of working is not that you’re feeling less anxious but that you are making some progress in doing what you want to do
TIP 91 Avoid These Four Common Responses to Anxiety
Don’t give up. Don’t fail to do things because you’re anxious
Instead, review your past successes. Remind yourself, I have done this sort of thing before. Parts of it were hard for me and I did feel uncomfortable, but I got through it. I can do it again
Don’t catastrophize. When we’re anxious, our thoughts easily run away from us—we predict that things will end badly and there will be lasting consequences
Instead, think from a distance. Try to make your assessment more rational by depersonalizing it, thinking about the situation as though it were happening to someone else
Don’t deny that you’re anxious. Don’t just keep repeating to yourself, Don’t be anxious don’t be anxious don’t be anxious
Instead, use suppression in the short term. Denial and suppression should not be your long-term plan, but suppression might be useful in the short term, especially if you have a plan to deal with the underlying issue later
Don’t self-medicate. Alcohol and other drugs may provide temporary relief from anxiety, and under a doctor’s supervision the limited use of medication may make sense for you
Anxiety is usually accompanied by certain thought patterns that make it worse, so it’s useful to be able to recognize them and direct your thoughts away from them should they occur.
TIP 92 Reinterpret What Your Mind Is Telling You
To begin with, normalize your thoughts, rather than fighting them or addressing them directly. This is normal, this thing that’s happening to me. It sucks, but it’s normal. I’m not crazy or weak, any more than someone who gets migraine headaches is crazy or weak. And it’s not unacceptable for me to feel anxious. It’s just something that happens to some people.
When you’ve been over that bit in your mind, it’s time to evaluate. What are the chances that one of the things you’re contemplating will actually happen? And what would the consequences be if it did? Is it really likely that the teacher will call on you when you don’t know an answer? Does that happen routinely? Or do you routinely worry about it, although it almost never does? Negative thoughts can seem powerful, but your thoughts can’t cause anything to happen. Thoughts are unsubstantial, temporary, and, we might add, private
The final step is to reengage. You’ve normalized your anxious thoughts, you’ve evaluated them, and now it’s time to get out of your head, beyond your thoughts. You need to reengage with the world. You need to show yourself that the thing that prompted your anxiety hasn’t beaten you. It can be a baby step
If you have something to do that you know will make you anxious, it is a good idea to use this three-step process a day or two beforehand.
This is hard work. It’s easy to say, Normalize your thoughts, but much harder to do it. In fact when you start, it may feel nearly impossible—but it gets easier. And remember, all forward movement is progress
Use a three-step process—normalize, evaluate, and reengage—to reinterpret what your mind is telling you when you’re anxious.
TIP 93 Reinterpret What Your Body Is Telling You
Anxiety involves both your mind and your body, and your anxious body complicates your efforts to calm your runaway mind. You may experience a hammering heart, tense muscles, sweating, dizziness, or some combination of these
But there’s actually another way to think about your body’s reaction: you get the same feeling when you’re excited
Think of yourself as excited. Your body is telling you that it’s ready for adventure!
Don’t assume that certain physical symptoms necessarily mean that you’re anxious, because you feel the same symptoms when you are excited
TIP 94 Tame Your Wild Thoughts with Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness meditation can help you change your relationship with your thoughts. Mindfulness meditation is simply the practice of observing your thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and doing so without judging them and without criticizing yourself. It’s not thinking about nothing; it is being in the moment
Why does watching your thoughts reduce anxiety? Two mechanisms may be at work. One is that you come to know a feeling of quiet in your mind—what it’s like not to have a torrent of troubling thoughts. Having felt that mental quiet frequently makes you more confident that you can find it again when you’re waiting for a final examination to begin or are in some other situation that makes you anxious
Mindfulness meditation might also help you improve your ability to recognize your thoughts more fully rather than react to them emotionally based on a glimpse of them.
Mindfulness meditation sounds daunting, but it fits the baby steps approach quite well. No one needs to know you’re doing it—as I noted, there are lots of tutorials on the internet and plenty of apps
Mindfulness meditation is easy to try and is a great help to some people in dealing with anxiety
Summary for Instructors
CONCLUSION
But how strong is the link between have to learn and not fun? Most students seem to think it’s pretty consistent. Sure, sometimes you get lucky and an instructor assigns a book you actually enjoy, and sometimes a great instructor finds a way to intrigue you about a topic you initially didn’t like. But even in those unusual cases, boredom or interest is still outside of your control.
The findings I’ve reviewed in this book indicate that that conclusion is mistaken. You can make yourself more interested in content that initially bores you. In this book, you’ve seen that
If information is interesting, you’ll attend to it more closely. If you attend to it more closely, you will remember it better. If you remember it better, you will more likely do well on tests. If you do well on tests, you’ll have more confidence in yourself as a student. If you’re more confident, academic tasks will seem more achievable. If tasks seem more achievable, you’ll procrastinate less. If you procrastinate less, you’ll keep up with your work. If you keep up with your work, you’ll know more about more topics. If you know something about a topic, new information on that subject will be easier to understand. If you understand new information, it will be more interesting
My students know about the first three effects; they find it easy to study and remember stuff that interests them. They seldom consider the other effects and often don’t know about some of them. For that reason, they view interest solely as a driver; they think that interest makes other processes (like attention and memory) work. They don’t see that interest can be a product of other cognitive processes.
You have probably experienced this effect firsthand. There was a subject you found boring and confusing, but you persisted until you understood it, and found that made it somewhat less boring. Perhaps even intriguing
Truly independent learners maintain a state of intellectual openness and curiosity. They are always ready to discover something new that they want to know more about. It’s an optimistic way to live, because their curiosity is buttressed by the knowledge that new learning ultimately brings interest, enjoyment, and satisfaction. Anything that’s unfamiliar can be a source of fun, and because each of us knows so little, the potential for fun is limitless.
People sometimes describe learning as exploring new terrain or as a journey. I think the travel metaphor is apt; learning new things brings the same sense of adventure and satisfaction as traveling somewhere exotic, seeing the local flora and fauna, meeting the people, and observing how they live
I set out to make the process of learning new information and skills easier, even in the absence of curiosity
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