Learn Better

Here is a summary of the idea in the book Learn Better

Re-reading and highlighting are particularly ineffective forms of learning. They’re too passive, and you are just kind of skimming that material. It makes you feel better. You feel more comfortable with the material, but you don’t really know the material. Doing things that are a little bit more difficult, that require you to really make connections, is a better way to learn.

You might explain things to yourself, or simply quiz yourself. If you’re preparing for a meeting, you’d be much better putting the material away and just asking yourself questions.

Making Connections

“Doing things that require you to really make connections”.

Think about how I and yuchen learn this new ideas. He made a lot of prototypes. He told me, it is easy to read and feel you understand, but when you start writing a real thing, you can find some real gaps.

For me, prototyping is difficult, as I need to spend time not just on the new knowledge point, but also on some other gaps so the prototype can run. But it is worth it. It is also a better way to learn.

It is also making connections and fill the gap.

Explain to yourself

• or teach them to others

  Self-explaining has a lot of evidence. You’re explaining why things might be interconnected, and why they matter, and the meaningful distinctions between the two of them. The other thing that is particularly helpful about teaching other people is that you have to think about what is confusing about something, and how’d explain that in a simpler way, and so that makes you shift the way that you’re thinking about the certain topic.

For me, one example is when I teach data structures and algorithms. The materials that I taught, I understand them so well. Though some is after one or two teaching sessions. I need to really think about them.

Ask yourself questions

putting the material away and ask yourself questions

Retrieval

Attempting to recall the material you are trying to learn—retrieval practice—is far more effective than simply rereading the material,” explains Barbara Oakley in A Mind for Numbers, a book whose evidence-based approach to learning math and science contains principles that can be applied to learning many other subjects as well. Oakley then mentions research by the psychologist Jeffrey Karpicke that has shown that “many students experience illusions of confidence when they are studying.”

Most students, Karpicke found, ‘repeatedly read their notes or textbook (despite the limited benefits of this strategy), but relatively few engage in self-testing or retrieval practice while studying.” When you have the book (or Google!) open right in front of you, it provides the illusion that the material is also in your brain. But it’s not. Because it can be easier to look at the book instead of recalling, students persist in their illusion—studying in a far less productive way.

Oakley, who is an engineering professor at Oakland University and the co-teacher of the popular online course Learning How to Learn, adds that “just wanting to learn the material, and spending a lot of time with it, doesn’t guarantee you’ll actually learn it. As Alan Baddeley, a renowned psychologist and expert on memory notes, ‘Intention to learn is helpful only if it leads to the use of good learning strategies.’”

how to retrieval

write down key concept, keywords, and key principle, mostly only the names. Close the book and try to recall their meanings.

The Animal Farm Principle

all times are created equal, but some time are more equal than others.

Find your most valuable time when you are the most productive, and try to make good use of it. Also try to collect more of it.

For me, the morning and the afternoon time are more productive than the time after dinner. After dinner, I only want to take some rest. What’s more, if I work during night, I have the chance of not sleeping well.

So for me, the best is to get to bed early and get up early so I can have more morning time for study. And I should apply the 25min focus time method so that I can quickly get to the right status.

Let’s try to apply the Animal Farm Principle.

Also try to not take any caffeine after 1 PM so that you can have a good night during early night.