Remember to practice to remember...
Picture an actor learning their lines - they're stanging up and talking, right? Actually practising them in order to learn better. So why do we always think we can learn by reading alone? (Guilty. Right here.)
Time to put your learning into action.
Whether you’re studying for something or have a back sweat-inducing presentation to nail - this one’s for you.
Make some noise
Active recall is probably a term you’ve heard bandied around, but what actually is it?
The idea is to do your presentation, or speak about the topic you’re studying out loud - even if you don’t think you know enough to do it right.
Each time you delve into your memory vault to retrieve information (even if you make mistakes), you update it with better understanding, so you learn more thoroughly.
Reading the information encodes the information, and trying to remember it makes the information easier to retrieve.
Says who?
This clever study by Karpicke & Blunt researched four types of learning;
1) study text once
2) study text four consecutive times
3) study text, then generate a concept map
4) study text, practise retrieval, study text again, practise retrieval again.
Who performed the best? You guessed it, number four.
Ready to give it a bash? Try these 5 active recall strategies.
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