Of course the big thing is to fi gure out a way to retrieve the information from memory, because that’s what you’re going to be asked to do on the test. If you can’t do it while you’re studying, then you’re not going to be able to do it on the test.
He became more mindful of that when he studied. “I would stop. ‘Okay, what did I just read? What is this about?’ I’d have to think about it. ‘Well, I believe it happens this way: The enzyme does this, and then it does that.’ And then I’d have to go back and check if I was way off base or on the right track.”
The pro cess was not a natural fi t. “It makes you uncomfortable at fi rst. If you stop and rehearse what you’re reading
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and quiz yourself on it, it just takes a lot longer. If you have a test coming up in a week and so much to cover, slowing down makes you pretty ner vous.” But the only way he knew of to cover more material, his established habit of dedicating long hours to rereading, wasn’t getting the results he needed. As hard as it was, he made himself stick to retrieval practice long enough at least to see if it worked. “You just have to trust the pro cess, and that was really the biggest hurdle for me, was to get myself to trust it. And it ended up working out really well for me.”
Really well. By the time he started his second year, Young had pulled his grades up from the bottom of his class of two hundred students to join the high performers, and he has remained there ever since.
Young spoke with us about how he adapted the principles of spaced retrieval practice and elaboration to medical school, where the challenges arise both from the sheer volume of material to be memorized and from the need to learn how complex systems work and how they interrelate with other systems. His comments are illuminating.
On deciding what’s important: “If it’s lecture material and you have four hundred PowerPoint slides, you don’t have time to rehearse every little detail. So you have to say, ‘Well this is important, and this isn’t.’ Medical school is all about fi guring out how to spend your time.”
On making yourself answer the question: “When you go back and review, instead of just rereading you need to see if you can recall the learning. Do I remember what this stuff was about? You always test yourself fi rst. And if you don’t remember, then that’s when you go back and look at it and try again.”
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On fi nding the right spacing: “I was aware of the spacing effect, and I knew that the longer you wait to practice retrieval the better it is for memory, but there’s also a trade- off with how successful you are when you try to recall it. When you have these long enzyme names, for example, and this step-by- step pro cess of what the enzyme is doing, maybe if you learn ten steps of what the enzyme is doing, you need to stop and think, can I remember what those ten steps are? Once I found a good strategy for how much to space practice and I started seeing consistent results, it was easy to follow from there because then I could just trust the pro cess and be confi -
dent that it was going to work.”
On slowing down to fi nd the meaning: Young has also slowed down the speed at which he reads material, thinking about meaning and using elaboration to better understand it and lodge it in memory. “When I read that dopamine is released from the ventral tegmental area, it didn’t mean a lot to me.” The idea is not to let words just “slide through your brain.” To get meaning from the dopamine statement, he dug deeper, identifi ed the structure within the brain and examined images of it, capturing the idea in his mind’s eye. “Just having that kind of visualization of what it looks like and where it is
[in the anatomy] really helps me to remember it.” He says there’s not enough time to learn everything about everything, but pausing to make it meaningful helps it stick.
Young’s impressive per for mance has not been lost on his professors or his peers. He has been invited to tutor struggling students, an honor few are given. He has been teaching them these techniques, and they are pulling up their grades.
“What gets me is how interested people are in this. Like, in medical school, I’ve talked to all of my friends about it, and now they’re really into it. People want to know how to learn.”
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Timothy Fellows, Intro Psych Student Stephen Madigan, a professor at the University of Southern California, was astonished by the per for mance of a student in his Psych 100 course. “It’s a tough course,” Madigan says. “I use the most diffi cult, advanced textbook, and there’s just a nonstop barrage of material. Three- quarters of the way through the class, I noticed this student named Timothy Fellows was getting 90 to 95 percent of the points on all the class activities—
exams, papers, short- answer questions, multiple- choice questions. Those were just extraordinary grades. Students this good— well he’s defi nitely an outlier. And so I just took him aside one day and said, ‘Could you tell me about your study habits?’ ”2
The year was 2005. Madigan did not know Fellows outside class but saw him around campus and at football games enough to observe that he had a life beyond his academics.
“Psychology wasn’t his major, but it was a subject he cared about, and he just brought all his skills to bear.” Madigan still has the list of study habit Fellows outlined, and he shares it with incoming students to this day.
Among the highlights were these:
• Always does the reading prior to a lecture
• Anticipates test questions and their answers as he reads
• Answers rhetorical questions in his head during lectures to test his retention of the reading
• Reviews study guides, fi nds terms he can’t recall or doesn’t know, and relearns those terms
• Copies bolded terms and their defi nitions into a reading notebook, making sure that he understands them
• Takes the practice test that is provided online by his professor; from this he discovers which concepts he doesn’t know and makes a point to learn them
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• Reorganizes the course information into a study guide of his design
• Writes out concepts that are detailed or important, posts them above his bed, and tests himself on them from time to time
• Spaces out his review and practice over the duration of the course
Fellows’s study habits are a good example of doing what works and keeping at it, so that practice is spaced and the learning is solidly embedded come exam time.
Tips for Lifelong Learners
The learning strategies we have just outlined for students are effective for anyone at any age. But they are centered around classroom instruction. Lifelong learners are using the same principles in a variety of less- structured settings.
In a sense, of course, we’re all lifelong learners. From the moment we’re born we start learning about the world around us through experimentation, trial and error, and random encounters with challenges that require us to recall what we did the last time we found ourselves in a similar circumstance. In other words, the techniques of generation, spaced practice and the like that we present in this book are organic (even if counterintuitive), and it’s not surprising that many people have already discovered their power in the pursuit of interests and careers that require continuous learning.
Retrieval Practice
Nathaniel Fuller is a professional actor with the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. We took an interest in him after a dinner party where the Guthrie’s renowned artistic director, Joe Dowling, on hearing of our work, immediately suggested
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we interview Fuller. It seems that Fuller has the capacity to so fully learn the lines and movements of a role for which he is understudy that he can go onstage at the last moment with great success, despite not having had the benefi t of learning and rehearsing it in the normal way.
