How do I study?

It’s been many years since I studied and I have just enrolled to do my Masters. I have a wad of readings to digest before I attend an intensive contact week which apparently involves discussion of the readings. My question is this; how do I remember what I’ve read? Should I take notes while I’m reading? Highlight stuff? Is there a trick to this?

Thankx.

According to my psychology of learning textbook, highlighting isn’t as effective as underlining, because underlining requires you to pay closer attention.

Essentially, the more often you encode the information, the better. Read it thoroughly, make annotations, then go back and create yourself a separate note sheet where you summarize, in your own words, what it is you need to learn. Say it out loud. It helps to create a mental picture that links you back to the memory. IIRC, most Jeopardy finalists have some sort of visual component to their memory, like creating “rooms” for information.

You want to read material in a state (sober, preferably) and location similar to the one in which you’ll be required to recall the information.

This is more of an IMHO since study style is a personal thing that varies considerably from person to person.

But for me I hate taking notes while I’m reading something for the first time as I find it distracting. If something seems important enough I may underline/star/highlight it, but that’s as much as I’ll do when I’m first absorbing it. Then I’ll go back, paying attention to the highlighted portions and the main chapters/points and try to outline the material. If planning to discuss it with a group as you are, I’d write my notes from this outline.

I’ve did a lot of research on “learning” methods and these are the 3 big methods that help me:

[ol][li]find the structure or superstructure. It’s much easier to remember (and understand) information if you have an internal framework in your brain to hang them on. The paradox is that most writers will not give hand you the structure on a silver platter; it’s not going to be embedded in the text you’re reading. Sometimes you’re lucky and the table-of-contents will be the structure you need. If not, you either have to find it (look on the web for how others categorize or systematize the data) or create it yourself.[/li][li]find a way to connect the data to what you already know. For example, if it’s a historical date from 30 years ago, I might think to myself “hmmm so my mother was in high-school when xxx happened.” If the date is 300 years ago, I think about what science technology was happening at that time because I like science. If you like art or music, you can hang dates off of that timeline. If it’s non-date related info, there’s always less than 6-degrees-of-sepration from that tidbit to trivia in a hobby that you pursue. Finding connections let’s my neurons “lock on” to that data and move it from short-term memory to long-term memory[/li][li]for memorization of a list of raw items, learn to use a mnemonic system such as the Major system[/li][/ol]
Everybody learns differently but I’ll just say I’m not a big fan of rereading things multiple times. Read about the same topic from different authors and viewpoints yes, but not reread the same passage that’s been highlighted. If you’re memorizing poetry or movie scripts to recite perfectly that’s different and obviously you need to reread – but regular academic information not so much. If you can create a good mental structure, that will dramatically cut down the amount of rereading… YMMV.

Writing information down helps me. Read first. Go back and determine what is important. Write it down. Write it down again later in different words, different format. The kinesthetic act of writing helps me recall it.

Also, like Ruminator said, connecting it to other info helps. I also use mnemonics right before an exam to make sure I don’t choke and forget something. Mine are usually really random and dumb but they help me.

In college I was told to read texts three times through like this:

  1. Read quickly, don’t worry about catching everything, just try to get a sense of what you will find there, and what the main points are.

  2. Read carefully, concentrating on understanding the details. (For me taking notes at this point helps - I don’t often go back to them, but just the act of writing things down gets things into my brain better.)

  3. Do a third quick-and-dirty read just to cement in your brain what the overall point was.

My strategy is as follows:

  1. read the material a paragraph or two at a time
  2. stop and paraphrase the material; I often try to summarize it in an overly simplified principle that is much easier to remember than the technical details. Part of this process is to find connections with what I already know.
  3. after an hour or two of repeating these two this, I go teach the material to someone. (My wife gets a lot of this, but fellow students, co-workers and forum readers do too).
  4. any areas that seemed hard to explain in step 3 need to be reviewed.

If I do all four steps, I can remember virtually anything forever. And #3 made me very popular in study groups.

Taking notes, highlighting material and listening to lectures are all worthless to me. Mnemonic devices are also worthless (I can’t remember the mnemonic unless I reconstruct it out of the material I really wanted to know in the first place).

That said, everyone is different. A roommate in college would read books out loud because hearing it helped him. Another made copious notes because the act of writing was key for him.

This is probably different for everyone. For me, I only really understand something if I have to know it to accomplish a task. So, in law school I read everything and then made an outline of the topics covered.

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin was very well received, although I haven’t read it.

Petek

Moving from GQ to IMHO.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

The above posters give good advice. In graduate programs you often have an extremely large volume of material to digest, so you may not have time for a multi-pass + note-taking method, though.

If you want a quicker method, I do not recommend highlighting – it is far too easy to do, and has a tendency to turn your textbook into a coloring book where 90% of the page is yellow. A better strategy is to underline and/or circle important material, and add notations in the margin. I recommend pencil so you can make changes later.

Don’t worry about marking up your books – at the graduate level you should plan on keeping them, and a few dollars lost in the resale market is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall cost of your degree.

Good luck, and congratulations on getting into graduate school!

I don’t know what kind of program you’re in, but there are some programs where the above advice, while admirable, is completely and totally impractical. What you end up learning how to do is get as much out of the text in the shortest possible time. Two passes? Try not even reading the whole book. Most of the time focusing on the introduction and conclusion helps (to understand the framework, as noted above). I’m a fan of highlighting, and if it’s something really important, I’ll either take notes while I’m reading or go over and make a second pass focusing on what I’ve highlighted.

Agreed with the above. I had to read two books a week or so per class for my MA coursework, and we didn’t have to memorize any of the information, but understand the arguments and make a critical judgment of the value of the readings and their relationships to other authors we’d read. Read the book twice? I was lucky if I read it all once! In this kind of situation, I suggest reading the intro, conclusion, a book review or two, and reading chapters out of order as they appear the most important. I like to take notes at the end of each chapter - if it stuck with me that long, it must be important.

Thanks everyone for lots of excellent suggestions which sound like they are going to be a great help. It’s a Masters in a law subject and the course is designed for lawyers, which I am not, so it will be a steep learning curve.