5 Powerful Study Methods You MUST know

5 powerful study techniques in 5 minutes. In this video we'll talk about retrieval practice and self-testing, flashcards, strategic revision, dual coding and the Leitner system. 5 powerful study techniques that the research backs up. The first powerful study technique is retrieval practice and self-testing. Pre-testing and asking your mind to recall what you know are the best ways to make your memory stronger. Do these two activities the most. But what does retrieval practice mean? The essence of retrieval-based learning is taking the material you're trying to learn, setting it aside and spending time actively retrieving the information. An example of retrieval practice follows this pattern. You study the book, you set it aside, you grab a blank paper and you start to write everything you recall. Or alternatively, you say it out loud. And finally, you check with the original material if what you wrote or what you said was correct. Checking for accuracy and practicing more what you got wrong is key for this process. Retrieval practice is often associated with self-testing and with the use of flashcards which use the same retrieval principle. They ask you a question, they force you to retrieve the information and then you can check if you got it wrong or right. Following the retrieval principle, you take all the tests available and you use them as much as you can. And also you make tests of your own, starting from the material that you need to know. The research shows how powerful this study technique is. It completely blows away every other technique. There are also three benefits with the retrieval practice technique. One, retrieval aids later retention. Two, you identify the gaps of things that you don't know. And three, testing produces better organization of knowledge. It's important to distinguish retrieval practice from root learning. Retrieval practice is not root learning. You're not repeating something over and over. You are asking yourself a question and you are actively and meaningfully recalling what you know about the subject. It's important to note down what you got wrong because then you know that you will need to revise that more often and you will need to revise less often what you got right. And this leads us to the second powerful study technique, which is flashcards. The use of flashcards is very effective. It is connected with higher knowledge retrieval. Flashcards are powerful because of the retrieval principle. It's interesting to note that the effectiveness of retrieval practice and flashcards was found by many different scientific studies. I just name a few here. However, the principle that makes these two techniques so powerful is the same. This leads us to the third powerful study technique, which is spaced repetition. Revise strategically. This way you maximize the remembered material. Keep in mind the abingus forgetting curve. So following the abingus principle, you should do your retrieval practice 10 minutes after class, one day after class, one week after class, and one month after class. Retrieval practice takes a lot of mental energy. So you want to do just a few hours each day. Usually I would set five hours at the very beginning of the day to do retrieval practice and then I will move on the next five to seven hours doing something else. And this leads us to the fourth powerful study technique, dual coding. Associate words to visuals and vice versa. This process enhances memory retention. Dual coding is when you use a picture and a text to learn a piece of information. So you combine the picture that you find in the book with the words it describes and vice versa. When you have the information in two forms, it will be much easier to remember later. You can also combine this information knowledge with flashcards, which means you can combine dual coding with retrieval practice. Another advantage of dual coding is that it is more creative. It usually doesn't take too much energy to sketch a picture of what you already know or to create a map. And this is what dual coding is all about. You come up with new ways to represent the information visually. Infographics, diagrams, maps. These are all great ways. Finally, there is one last technique, which is a great way to combine everything we have seen so far. It is called the Lintner system. With this technique, you have five boxes. The first box is for the flashcards you need to revise today. The second box is for the flashcards you need to revise tomorrow. The third box is for the flashcards you need to revise in one week. And the fourth box is for the flashcards you need to revise in one month. So here we have the retrieval practice combined with the Abingus curve. But there is more, because the Lintner system works like this. When you get the flashcards of today's box right, you move it to the next one. Tomorrow, when you get that flashcards right, you move it to the next box, which is next week, and so on and so forth. However, if you get at any point an answer wrong, then you move that flashcards to the first box. You can combine all the techniques we have seen so far with the Lintner system. And this makes for a very powerful technique, because it combines retrieval practice with flashcards, with spaced repetition, and potentially with dual coding. And by combining them, you create an even more powerful ultimate technique, which is the result of many different researches. With the combination of these study techniques, I am confident you will improve your study process and get better grades. Thank you for watching the video and see you next time.