![]() Planning doesn't need to take long just a single Pomodoro of 25-minutes or less the day before a lecture. Equally if you planned ahead and know the course syllabus and the learning outcomes if a lecturer goes off-topic you immediately know if it isn't relevant or useful and you can remain focused on the key high-yield concepts. This then allows you to test yourself in the lecture using active recall when the lecturer mentions topics or poses questions. Planning and preparing before the lecture will also help you to learn some top-level concepts ahead of the lecture and spot anything that you find difficult as you make questions in the next section. You can then use this to help you to scope out any key concepts and learning outcomes. If you don't have any lecture notes ahead of a lecture dive into the recommended textbook for that subject and match the lecture to the relevant chapter. Most lectures will have aims and outcomes highlighted at the start and by making sure you understand these as a minimum it will give you better insight into what is important and allow you to be more focused in your learning when in a lecture. I'll block out time the day before a lecture to go over the lecture notes and make sure I know the learning outcomes and what is going to be covered and I'll also skim through to see if there are any terms or concepts that I don't know. So every week before lectures I'll plan out what lectures are coming up, where they fit into the course syllabus and what might be tested on an exam and what I'm going to study. ![]() PlanĪs I used to just rock up to lectures I rarely had any context for what was being taught and I definitely didn't read the course syllabus in any great detail. I experimented with the SQR3 method but as I'm obsessed with efficiency and productivity I simplified it to plan, questions, review and repeat so let's look at the planning phase first. Robinson, a prominent American education philosopher in his 1946 book Effective Study. This is a simplified version of a reading comprehension framework known as SQR3 named for its five steps: survey, question, read, recite and review. In one sentence, the strategy is plan, create questions, review and then repeat. I avoid highlighting, rereading, or summarize at all costs. ![]() The core of the strategy is based around active recall, practice testing and spaced repetition. So let's take a deeper look at the strategy I used and where it came from. After realising all of this and spurred on by failing an exam I experimented with a few methods and researched lots more and came up with a strategy that saved me loads of time and helped me come 1st in medical and surgical exams. We all have this misconception that, in order to study, we have to put stuff into our brains, but actually it's flipped on its head if you look at the evidence, the actual way to remember anything and to make anything stick, is by retrieving information from our brains rather than trying to put it back in. While copying down the slides might help you stay awake during lectures and it might make you feel like you have accomplished something and been productive in reality the fastest way to learn and retain information is by making our brains work by testing ourselves and recalling information which is an active process. Photo by Austrian National Library / UnsplashÄespite all this overwhelming evidence all of us still default to note taking and rereading and there's a simple reason it's because it's easy, it's passive and it's what we were taught in school. which I later read and which I cover in my article on active recall. This wasted loads of time and these study methods of re-reading and summarising information were shown to be inefficient and ineffective in a 2013 study by Dunlosky et al. I'd then try to make sense of my notes, condense them and re-read them before an exam. ![]() I would just copy everything from the powerpoint slides and note down word-for-word what the lecturer said without really trying to understanding anything. I would usually turn up to lectures without any preparation and then find it a bit boring sitting and listening for anything from 30-60 minutes. Unfortunately this method didn't work great for me as I failed an exam as nobody had taught me how to actually study and learn. Well in my first year at medical school I sat in lectures taking down notes from the slides and then reading back and highlighting these to prepare for exams.
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