It was the weekend before my Biology final, and I’d run out of options. I was going to have to ask my Dad how to study.
I knew he had some technique, because I’d heard him describing it to my older siblings. He’d used it throughout high school, and college, and medical school, and even law school. But I didn’t know the details. Whenever he’d start to describe it, I’d flash a “have fun studying!” grin to my sibling on my way out the room (yes, I’m the youngest).
But now it was my turn to study. I needed an A+ on this final, or I wouldn’t even get an A- in the class. I’d paid attention in class (mostly), and had done what I could in free moments before class (sometimes), but that wasn’t going to be enough this time. Krebs? Meiosis? DNA polymerase? If these topics had made sense at one point that year, they meant nothing to me now. So I sidled up to my Dad:
“Uhhh, so…what was that studying technique you mentioned a while ago?”
My question turned out to be the start of a very rewarding conversation about learning, one that we have continued off and on for almost three decades now. How do people learn? What teaching methods work? He was interested in these questions too, and has remained interested throughout all of my attempts to learn and teach, from trumpet performance to test prep to Mathchops.
But at the time, I just wanted the grade. He called his technique “boiling down your notes”, and his description of it went something like this:
“Write everything down in one place. Make sure it’s all in there – lecture quotes, questions from quizzes and tests, relevant textbook passages. These are your notes.
“Now rewrite your notes so that they are more concise. If you start with 10 pages, maybe you’ll get it down to 7. Then boil them down again, and again, and again, until you have everything down to one page. Get it down to one word if you can! When you can’t boil them down any further, memorize what is left.
“And this is important: each time you rewrite, make sure you aren’t leaving anything out. Keep quizzing yourself by picking random items from that first collection of notes. You should immediately know what the item is and how it relates to the rest of the material.”
I know now that this process incorporates many of the most powerful learning techniques recommended by cognitive scientists:
Retrieval: When you attempt to remember (“retrieve”) the information, you make it easier to recall it in the future. Quizzing myself by picking random items from the original notes was a form of this.
Interleaving: As you progress through your notes, you work through all of the topics that might appear on the test, but you’re switching from one topic to another fairly frequently. You might hit A, B, C, D, E, and F before coming back to A again. This is much more effective than blocked practice, in which you do a lot of work on A all at once, then move on to B….
Chunking: The only way to ‘boil down your notes’ without losing critical information is to make connections between items. You have to turn many discrete items into one ‘chunk’. It’s like when you’re learning how to get around a neighborhood. At first, you might need to memorize every step: “Go to Midway and turn right. Then turn right on El Dorado. Then turn left on 98. Then get on I-80 West.” But when you know the neighborhood, you can just say, “Get on I-80 West.” And this direction would work, even if you were starting from different points in the city, or ran into traffic, or wanted to take a more scenic route, because you now have a mental model of the neighborhood. Similarly, if you have a mental model of DNA replication, details like helicase, nucleotides, and DNA polymerase are much easier to remember, because they’re all part of one model.
There is also an absurdly effective test prep version of this process, described in more detail here. But briefly: You start with a long list of missed questions. For each question, you pull up a blank copy and see if you can get it right. If so, you don’t have to do it again. But if you get it wrong, it stays on the list. You’ll redo it again in the next round, after you’ve done everything else.
Redoing missed questions in this way makes use of the same powerful techniques described above. Every time you redo a missed question, you’re practicing retrieval. The question types are mixed (interleaving). As you work through the questions, you try to make connections (chunking). You might notice, for example, that identifying independent clauses is the key to answering many punctuation questions. Or you might see similarities between the transformations you apply to ellipses, circles, and cubic functions.
Boiling down your notes is very effective, but it’s not easy. It takes a lot of effort to actively “make sense” of the material, to recall and reformulate an item, sharpen your understanding of it, and then relate it to other items. It takes will power to actively search for items on your original list that may have gotten lost at some point during the process. It’s frustrating to jump from one topic to the next, moving on just when you’re getting comfortable.
I really wanted that A-, so I was up for the work. I studied longer and more intensely than I ever had before. At one point I studied for 5 hours in a row, a feat that seemed superhuman to me at the time. Surely this would be enough for not just an A+, but the highest grade in the class!
Of course, I didn’t get the highest grade in the class – that went to the kid who had paid attention all semester, taken great notes, and studied regularly (the one who deserved it, in other words). But I did get my A-. More importantly, I gained a learning approach that I still use to this day.