What Study Gurus Get Wrong About Learning – Transcript

00:00This is really a response video to two of Justin's songs videos on studying. One of his videos critiques the effectiveness of study techniques based on retrieval and the other one advocates for study techniques based on effective encoding. What are retrieval and encoding? Encoding is about putting things into your head. So when you first see a bit of information how do you get that thing into your head? Retrieval is about remembering or recalling that information - kind of pulling

00:27the information back out again. Justin is one of the better people talking about study techniques on YouTube. I highly recommend his videos if you're interested in developing effective study techniques, especially if you're a medical student or an undergraduate student or a law student or something like this, go watch his videos. I'm making this video to clear up some misconceptions that I think his video brings up when it comes to retrieval-based study techniques. Who am I?

00:53I have a PhD in learning Sciences from a fancy university. I basically study the research on learning for a living and I help companies to implement that research effectively. If you understand Justin's perspective on encoding and my perspective on retrieval - you're gonna find out they're not that different - then you will have a much better understanding of how to create effective study techniques on your own. Let's start with some of the basics, here,

01:19which Justin goes over really well. "Here's how this works. Some of this information that initially came in through sensory pathways goes into a working memory and then from our working memory goes into our long-term memory and this is a process that we call encoding.

01:38Now, when we want to use this information we have to retrieve it from our long-term memory and this is what's called retrieval. So the working memory is where you're going to be spending a lot of your time when you're manipulating the information but it's not a good place to hold on to it because the working memory will also forget information relatively quickly, in the span of sort of seconds to minutes. Now your long-term memory is a little bit different. Your long-term memory will

02:05forget things as well, but it will forget things much more slowly. It will forget things in the span of hours to even months and it depends on how strongly it was encoded in this process." Here, my little tiny addition is just to say that memories in the long-term memory system do not just kind of disappear. They don't go away like they do in your working memory. so if it's stored in long-term

02:31memory the main problem is how to get access to it again - how can the brain retrieve and find the memory again. So what's Justin's beef with active recall? "The recall and space repetition is inherently very repetitive. In fact that's kind of the whole reason it works is that it's repetitive. A lot of the students that are using spaced repetition active-recall based systems will find that it's not actually working as well as it seems like it should be working. It's not giving them the results that they've kind of been promised; that they expected to get. It can be

03:01extremely monotonous and Incredibly tedious; very, very time consuming, and, in fact, actually pretty demoralizing if you're not getting the results." He basically says active recall is okay but not that helpful and all it's doing is really helping you to move these forgetting curves kind of longer and longer and longer, but that you really should be focused on something else. It seems like that contradicts what I say in this video: "free recall is one of the most powerful and basic

03:27study strategies there is." But it doesn't. The thing that he is criticizing is actually not the thing that I am advocating for. Let's dig into the language he is using because I think this is really, really important. The technique that he's criticizing is "a pretty common technique that a lot of people are using" "it's easy to use," "very easy techniques to learn," "pretty much anyone can pick it up, it doesn't have any real learning curve". He mentions flash cards a number of times - "Flash cards," flash cards," "flashcards," "Anki flashcards" - and he uses this term

03:57"revision" or "revise" to talk about the recall: "repetitions," "revise this information," "repeat this information," "repetition and revision". Now, what he is talking about is called a spaced retrieval system and the term in the literature that is often used that I am talking about is called spaced retrieval practice. Sounds almost the same, doesn't it? What he is talking about are apps like Supermemo, Anki, Quizlet, Memrise, all of these flash card apps - and there's a

04:25million of them out there. So he is critiquing a very specific form of retrieval practice and he is not talking about things like free recall or other more effective retrieval-based techniques. I also think flash cards and flash card apps are not terribly helpful and the reason is that they focus on isolated, decontextualized facts. They do not encourage synthesis or knowledge reorganization inside the brain; they do not encourage you to compare or contrast things with one another;

04:55they do not encourage you to apply things in new contexts. So for all these reasons, flashcards are a very weak system for learning. Let's pay attention to these ideas, shall we? I think the most effective studiers either do not use flashcards or use them very sparingly. So what does Justin recommend people do? Instead of using flashcards, he wants people to encode more effectively. he thinks people are not very effective at remembering information when they

05:23first hear it - they're not trying to understand the information deeply enough and they're kind of revving their engines a bit because they're so focused on getting the information into their flash card app that they're not actually paying attention to the information in the first place. Now, it's interesting that he uses this term desirable difficulty. Desirable difficulties are things that make learning harder in the short-term but result in longer-lasting, more durable, more flexible learning. The classic examples of desirable difficulties are spaced practiced,

05:51interleaved practice, contextual variation, and testing. So spaced practice is when you space your practice sessions out or space your studying sessions out. Interleaved practice is when you mix up problem types that you are working on or category types that you're working on. Contextual variation is where you see ideas in different contexts and are forced to, say, apply them in different contexts or vary the situations that you're practicing something in. Testing... that's

06:21just testing. There are still some things we don't know about why these techniques work, but the research consensus is that part of what makes all of these techniques work is retrieval. With spacing, you have to use retrieval because you've forgotten what you were learning and you need to remember it again, so that strengthens the retrieval path. With interleaving, some of the same things are going on: you have to activate different association networks alternately as you are looking at different kinds of problems. With contextual variation, again,

06:50you are kind of departing from a practice and then coming back to the practice again so it involves some some retrieval, some recall, some memory and the same is true of testing. And I have a bunch of videos on these going more into detail in the description. So if flashcards are not effective, what is effective retrieval practice? Well this is where Justin Sung's video on encoding comes in. "As soon as possible we want to just jump to higher-order learning and that is something

07:18like applying but more so things like analyzing and evaluating the ideas. It's not just about having one idea and then just understanding that idea really, really well and focusing on understanding that idea, it's about taking that idea and then looking at it in relation to another idea and comparing and contrasting between them but not just one or two but multiple different

07:42ideas and seeing the relationships between them. And then the next step evaluating, this is about not just comparing and contrasting the ideas but it's about figuring out how we can judge them, how we can prioritize them. In order to do correct encoding we always need to try to relate the information to each other and to the bigger picture." So it requires synthesizing concepts,

08:08reorganizing concepts, applying ideas to new contexts, and comparing ideas to each other. Sound familiar? This advice doesn't just apply to encoding it applies to retrieval as well. If your retrieval practice does not have these things, it's just not going to be that effective.

08:26Spaced repetition apps get the spacing part, but they miss out on all this other stuff and that's why they're not terribly effective. When you're thinking about retrieval, one of the questions you can ask yourself is what is an effective way of testing my skill? And this is where a lot of the research on memory bleeds into the research on deliberate practice. This sounds really simple,

08:51but everyone forgets it - generally speaking you want to practice the skills that you want to get better at. If you're studying a language, having a conversation with someone in the target language that you are studying involves retrieval. That is a retrieval-based practice. You have to remember the right words and the right grammatical structures and put them together in the right way to respond in a natural way to what someone is saying. If you are studying math, solving math

09:20problems is a retrieval-based practice: you are recalling information from your brain and applying it to a new context or maybe an old context that you've forgotten about. Free recall, which I talk about in another video, is just the baseline. That's just like, "hey, give me a blank sheet of paper, try to remember everything I can." Most of the stuff we learn in school is about applying information. It's about understanding things. It's about flexibly using concepts in new situations.

09:48If the retrieval practice that you're doing doesn't involve these things, you got problems. It's like playing t-ball all your life and expecting that you are going to suddenly get good at baseball. Now, there's not a lot of studies that directly compare, say, encoding methods to retrieval methods, this, however, is a really good example. And just to show you the results here, this is two kinds of different tests. We've got concept mapping, which is a version of elaborative

10:14encoding, and we've got free recall, which is a version of retrieval practice. And you can see here, basically, on all the tests, that retrieval practice basically blows concept mapping out of the water. In this particular experiment, however, people think that concept mapping is better than retrieval practice. This is what what people predicted would happen, but this is what actually happened. You have problems because there are a bunch of different ways you could do

10:44encoding and a bunch of different ways you could do retrieval, but the studies that I am aware of find that retrieval is absurdly effective. And by retrieval, usually they are using either tests (so tests that a teacher has created that you give the student to do instead of asking them to reread) or they are free recall tests. You don't have to choose between encoding and retrieval - you can

11:08do both. Encoding is really important and you want to do that effectively. Retrieval is also really important and you want to do that effectively. And for both of these activities you want to be focused on the higher-level thinking skills that Justin is talking about in his video. Go check out Justin's channel. "Learning is legitimately, really, really complicated." And you can see more videos on all the topics I talked about in the description below. See you next time.