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Studying Techniques: Unlocking Your Full Potential
The Study Skills Handbook: How to Ace Tests, Get Straight A’s, and Succeed in School (Learning how to Learn Book 17) By: Peter Hollins
Hear it Here - https://bit.ly/StudySkillsHollins
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099QWGNNG
This video delves into effective studying techniques drawn from "The Study Skills Handbook: How to Ace Tests, Get Straight As, and Succeed in School" by Peter Hollins. Learn how to make your study sessions fun, easy, and successful. We'll discuss Chapter 2 topics including subject mastery, teaching others, and The Learning Pyramid. Discover the power of The Protégé Effect in enhancing your learning experience. Join us as we unravel these valuable strategies to help you reach your academic goals.
"Studying Techniques: Unlocking Your Full Potential - Study Skills Handbook"
**Tags/Keywords:**
- Study Skills Handbook
- Peter Hollins
- Studying Techniques
- Subject Mastery
- Teaching Others
- Learning Pyramid
- Protégé Effect
**Learning Through Teaching:**
- Deepens our understanding and retention
- Discovers richer appreciation for concepts
- Effective strategy to improve recall and comprehension
**The Protégé Effect:**
- Students who teach others perform better
- Incremental learning, responsibility, egoprotection
**Analogies in Teaching:**
- Powerful tools for conveying new concepts
- Use various analogies for different topics
- Clarify purpose and reserve them for complex ideas
Join us as we delve into the fascinating world of learning through teaching. Discover how this approach deepens our understanding, enhances recall, and leads to better comprehension. We'll explore the protégé effect, a phenomenon where students who teach others thrive in their academic journey. Lastly, we'll unpack the power of analogies in teaching – an essential tool for effectively conveying new concepts. Stay tuned as we dive into these topics and more!
• By learning to teach others, we deepen our own understanding and retention, since we uncover a richer and more fundamental appreciation of the concepts behind the material. Compared to other strategies, teaching others may have the highest chance of improving recall and comprehension.
• The protégé effect is the observation that students who teach others do better, perhaps because they learn incrementally, take responsibility for the learning process, and are “ego-protected” from the prospect of failure.
• Analogies, examples, and metaphors are powerful tools to convey new concepts. To use them effectively in teaching/learning, make use of as many different analogies as possible and mix them in frequently, using examples to illustrate. Only use those analogies that actually work (i.e. don’t forget their purpose) and reserve them more complex topics, since they may only confuse simpler ideas.
**Key Takeaways:**
- Teaching others deepens your own understanding and retention of concepts
- The protégé effect: students who teach others perform better
- Use analogies, examples, and metaphors to convey new concepts effectively
- Use multiple analogies for complex topics
- Avoid confusing simpler ideas with overly complex analogies
**Additional Notes:**
- Teaching others enhances learning experience
- Protégé effect: students take responsibility and are protected from failure
- Analogies provide effective illustrations, but use them wisely.
Transcript
Are you tired of spending hours trying to learn something new only to feel like you didn't learn a thing?
Speaker:What if there was a way to make studying stick and even enjoy the process?
Speaker:Hello listeners and welcome back to the Science of Self, the podcast where we help you improve your life from the inside out.
Speaker:Today's featured book from Peter Hollins is the Study Skills Handbook, How to Ace Tests, Get Straight A's, and Succeed in School.
Speaker:This is from the Learning How to Learn book series, but it doesn't just apply to schooling.
Speaker:If you're trying to learn something for work or even just personal improvement, these tips and hints can help you accomplish your goals.
Speaker:Our episode today is the first half of chapter two, entitled Subject Mastery.
Speaker:We're going to take a look in this chapter at six different ways to improve the mastery that we have over a particular subject.
Speaker:Today's episode covers the first three.
Speaker:And these first three in general all include the same process, that of expanding your learning by becoming a teacher.
Speaker:Nothing ensures that you know a subject the way you should by being able to teach it.
Speaker:We're also going to talk about the protege effect, which declares that students who teach others perform better.
Speaker:And then finally, we'll look at analogies used in teaching.
Speaker:Analogies are like similes, or should I say, a simile is an analog, okay, anyway, however you want to say it.
Speaker:Analogies are powerful tools for conveying new concepts and can be used for many different topics and complex ideas.
Speaker:Thanks for joining us today.
Speaker:Don't forget to check the show notes for the timestamp of the chapter summary at the end of the podcast if you need a quick refresher on the topics covered in today's episode.
Speaker:You might wonder why a book on learning would include a section on teaching.
Speaker:Rather than teaching and learning being opposites, they are really two aspects of the same single process—in understanding both, we gain a fuller appreciation than if we had examined the subject from just one side or the other.
Speaker:There is unexpected value in observing how others synthesize information.
Speaker:First, you will see how someone else learns and absorbs information.
Speaker:Sometimes you can visibly see someone’s face light up when they get it, and this is no small feat in the process of learning.
Speaker:Second, you will see how the act of teaching improves the learning of the teacher.
Speaker:In observing how people synthesize information, you can improve upon how you do it.
Speaker:Understanding both sides of the coin is a helpful exercise.
Speaker:This, of course, is the process of teaching others to help you yourself learn.
Speaker:This chapter is about how learning to effectively teach others is a great method of learning in itself—and a good skill to have in general.
Speaker:The Learning Pyramid
Speaker:30 00:03:31,080 --> 00:03:38,720 Have you ever had the experience of thinking you “know” something, and yet the moment you try to explain that to someone else, it all seems to fall apart?
Speaker:Suddenly, you don’t feel so confident in your understanding.
Speaker:Using mind maps and notes are great ways of externalizing info so we can manipulate it clearly, but teaching others is the gold standard in externalization and quickly reveals any gaps or faulty assumptions in our own mental models.
Speaker:The infamous learning pyramid—also called “the cone of experience”—sheds light on why being able to teach is vital.
Speaker:In fact, much of what we talk about dances around the spectrum of more passive learning as less useful and more active learning as more impactful.
Speaker:This is what the learning pyramid encompasses.
Speaker:Some may take it as gospel, but the numbers are best if they are seen as rough guidelines.
Speaker:However, they still showcase the different results our learning activities, as learners, retain:
Speaker:• Ninety percent of what they learn when they teach someone else or use their skills immediately
Speaker:• Seventy-five percent of what they learn when they practice what they learned
Speaker:• Fifty percent of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion
Speaker:• Thirty percent of what they learn when they see a demonstration
Speaker:• Twenty percent of what they learn from audio-visual
Speaker:• Ten percent of what they’ve learned from reading
Speaker:• Five percent of what they’ve learned from a lecture
Speaker:These numbers aren’t exact or necessarily even proven.
Speaker:As with most modern theories or modules of education, the learning pyramid faces its share of dissenters.
Speaker:However, it does show a general trend that’s true: the more involved you are, the better you learn.
Speaker:The more active and deliberate, the better.
Speaker:Without a doubt, teaching is one of the most involved, participatory, and non-passive types of interactions with new information we can have.
Speaker:Like self-explanation and the Feynman technique, teaching someone not only roots information in your mind, it forces you to see what you truly can explain and what you can’t.
Speaker:Teaching yourself is good; teaching others is even better.
Speaker:Teaching exposes the gaps in your knowledge.
Speaker:Having to instruct and explain doesn’t let you hide behind generalizations: “Yeah, I know all about how that works.
Speaker:I’ll skip it for now.” That won’t fly if you’re explaining a process to someone else—you have to know how every step works and how each step relates to each other.
Speaker:You’ll also be forced to answer questions about the information you’re teaching, and iron out the exact relationships between ideas.
Speaker:Having to explain what’s going on is essentially a test of your knowledge, and you either know it or you don’t.
Speaker:If you can’t explain to someone how to replicate something you are teaching, then you actually don’t know it yourself.
Speaker:For whatever reason, it’s easier to believe you understand something better than you do right up until you’re forced to prove it!
Speaker:Let’s take photography as an example.
Speaker:According to the learning pyramid, reading and lecturing combined take up fifteen percent of your retained knowledge, which makes sense: there’s only so much you can learn about photography from a textbook or a lectern.
Speaker:Audio-visual aids and seeing demonstrations—what certain angles look like, how to use computers to filter a print—are more helpful in learning to take and process certain pictures.
Speaker:A group discussion about photography would unlock some memorable ideas, and of course, spending the time to practice taking and developing pictures makes solid impressions on your experience.
Speaker:Now let’s examine the bottom (or top, depending on your view) part of the pyramid related to teaching others.
Speaker:You’re reinforcing the basic knowledge in others and explaining the principles, types, and general guidelines of photography.
Speaker:Theoretically, you’re overseeing all the upper (or lower) segments of the pyramid for students and using your knowledge of the photography process as a guidepost for all of them.
Speaker:And this doesn’t even include the pre-instruction time when you’re preparing for your own class.
Speaker:All those teaching activities are active agents that call upon what you already know—and remember when we said you get more from pulling something out of your brain than putting stuff into it?
Speaker:That’s exactly what’s happening with that ninety percent tier of the pyramid.
Speaker:You’re actively extracting from your previously learned knowledge, sending it out, and reshaping it for others to understand and learn.
Speaker:In turn, that reinforces what you know and deepens your experience in the process.
Speaker:It’s common that you even surprise yourself and find additional insights by explaining and reasoning out loud in a way that simplifies and condenses.
Speaker:Putting vague concepts into concrete words and images can often have a clarifying effect on your understanding, not to mention your students’.
Speaker:Teaching forces you to create bite-sized chunks and teach replication—a task you may find far different from explaining theories or concepts.
Speaker:The Protégé Effect
Speaker:76 00:08:53,440 --> 00:09:00,680 “Teaching to learn” isn’t a radical or even particularly novel concept.
Speaker:In the field of education, it’s already regarded as one of the best ways to learn.
Speaker:But there’s another element to why teaching can be so helpful to the teacher.
Speaker:Recent studies have given rise to something researchers call the “protégé effect.” This process demonstrates that people who teach others work harder to understand, recall, and apply material more accurately and effectively.
Speaker:There’s something about the work required to extend your knowledge and understanding to another mind that makes you more creative, empathetic, and broader minded.
Speaker:Tutors in general therefore score more highly on tests than their non-tutoring counterparts.
Speaker:Why do you think this might be?
Speaker:To increase the usefulness of this effect, scientists have developed virtual pupils for students to tutor.
Speaker:These virtual students are known as “teachable agents” (TAs).
Speaker:Researchers at Stanford University, which is sort of a hotbed for this kind of technology, explain TAs as follows:
Speaker:“Students teach their agent by creating a concept map that serves as the agent’s ‘brain.’ An artificial intelligence engine enables the agent to interactively answer questions posed to it by traversing the links and nodes in its map.
Speaker:As the agent reasons, it also animates the path it is following, thereby providing feedback as well as a visible model of thinking for the students.
Speaker:Students can then use the feedback to revise their agent’s knowledge (and consequently, their own).”
Speaker:Students working with a teachable agent are therefore on the opposite side of where they usually are in the typical teaching paradigm—instead of being the student, they’re the teacher.
Speaker:The TAs serve as student models, and like all active students, they can ask questions and even give wrong answers.
Speaker:Trials have shown that students using TAs significantly outperform their peers who have only been studying for themselves without TAs to serve as feedback.
Speaker:Stanford scientists studied the effects of TAs on eighth-grade biology students.
Speaker:Some students were asked to learn biological concepts so they could teach their TAs.
Speaker:The rest were asked to develop an online concept map to demonstrate how their understanding of the concepts was organized.
Speaker:Results showed the students who worked with TAs spent more time engaged with the concept and displayed more motivation to learn.
Speaker:Simply put, the students put forth greater effort to learn for “teaching” their TAs than they did for themselves.
Speaker:They felt responsibility and accountability beyond themselves, and this made them put in the extra work regarding their expertise—the protégés are depending on you!
Speaker:The scientists at Stanford attributed three factors to the power of the protégé effect:
Speaker:The ego-protective buffer.
Speaker:This is a sort of psychological shield that allows students to examine failure without the negative feelings it typically produces.
Speaker:This can be a powerful metacognitive force since students are more apt to reflect upon their learning without the emotional sting of disappointment.
Speaker:It’s almost like a crash course in cultivating a growth mindset and embracing failure productively.
Speaker:Incrementalistic view of intelligence.
Speaker:When the learning process is directed externally to support another’s learning, students spend more time examining their own understanding.
Speaker:This helps students see how reviewing and revising their insight can impact their own learning.
Speaker:Sense of responsibility.
Speaker:Teaching another person—or, in this example, the virtual TAs—motivates students to take more command over their own learning process.
Speaker:When they realize that what they say will be absorbed by another thinking unit, they’re more meticulous about getting the information right to begin with.
Speaker:Learning is always going to be more effective when we adopt an attitude of conscious and active control over the process, which is something teachers are naturally encouraged to do.
Speaker:Not all of us who aren’t teachers or tutors have the opportunity to share our knowledge directly with willing students.
Speaker:However, thanks again to the miracle of technology, you can find plenty of online sites with message boards or forums all filled with questions you can answer (or at least find the answers for).
Speaker:A nice site to start with—despite its somewhat unruly nature—is Quora.com, where users just literally ask questions of the hive-mind of the internet.
Speaker:Many questions are very general, and some serve as bait for trolls or fanatics.
Speaker:But they’re easily funneled out, and you’re left with a lot of genuine inquiries asking for serious answers.
Speaker:It’s a good, almost comically quick way to share information with others—more importantly, it allows you to reap the rewards of the protégé effect and learn better.
Speaker:Another way to bring the magic of teaching others into your own study is simply to work in groups with other students and take turns “teaching” one another.
Speaker:And while it’s a little corny at first, you can even achieve similar results by pretending to teach someone else.
Speaker:Make your own presentation and literally stand up and teach an imaginary person (yes, you can address your pet rock or stuffed toy if it makes it easier!).
Speaker:Ask yourself what questions they might ask, or notice where your explanation seems a little vague or strained.
Speaker:Let's recap our three main takeaways from this episode.
Speaker:By learning to teach others, we deepen our own understanding and retention, since we uncover a richer and more fundamental appreciation of the concepts behind the material.
Speaker:Compared to other strategies, teaching others may have the highest chance of improving recall and comprehension.
Speaker:The protege effect is the observation that students who teach others do better, perhaps because they learn incrementally, take responsibility for the learning process, and are ego-protected from the prospect of failure.
Speaker:Analogies, examples, and metaphors are powerful tools to convey new concepts.
Speaker:To use them effectively in teaching or learning, make use of as many different analogies as possible and mix them in frequently, using examples to illustrate.
Speaker:Only use those analogies that actually work, and reserve them for more complex topics, since they may only confuse simpler ideas.
Speaker:We'll leave you today with a quote from Richard Feynman, known, of course, for proposing that if you can't explain something to a five-year-old and make them understand it, you don't know the subject well enough.
Speaker:Feynman said, I don't know what's the matter with people.
Speaker:They don't learn by understanding.
Speaker:They learn by some other way, by rote or something.
Speaker:Their knowledge is so fragile.
Speaker:I don't know what's the matter with people.
Speaker:And there's no way you say.
Speaker:I don't know what the matter with people.
Speaker:I don't know how you think about this.
Speaker:I don't know how you think about that.
Speaker:I have a discussion of why it's not in online wy,-
