7 Study Techniques of Top Performing Learners for Effective Learning

hey folks it's alex and today we're going to be talking about what makes that top 1 of learners outperform

everyone else when it comes to studying for exams or just learning in general we all know that one person who seems to

come first in exams every single time and who seems super smart and gets top grades and we often put this down to

their intelligence or some kind of genetic ability well i've sat loads of exams from school through medical school

and some really tough postgraduate surgical exams and i've also coached hundreds of learners at both undergrad

level and in work and there's definitely some trends that i've noticed between the top performing learners and students

and the ones who don't quite perform as well and none of these have anything to do with genetics or intelligence

whether it's at school college university or in work the most effective learners seem to possess some common

habits and techniques that set them apart from everyone else and in this video i'm going to break these down into

seven habits and study techniques that you can apply right now to become a top performer yourself and learn faster and

more effectively than ever before and i'm also gonna touch on a bonus eight study technique at the end so do stick

around so the first thing i noticed that the top performing or smartest learners do that many others don't is that they

understand that learning at anything is a journey and more than that they know that the journey isn't a straight line

learning is messy and your learning journey never really ends i first noticed this study technique in med

school where the majority of my time was spent studying and learning to pass exams while most medical students would

read books and highlight their notes with a focus on memorizing knowledge to then remember those facts for exams the

people who actually performed the best at the exams had a much deeper understanding of the topics they were

learning and were much better equipped to actually work out problems the people who got the best exam scores were also

more relaxed around exam time and this was because they focused on that learning journey rather than worrying

about if they knew every single fact i remember i asked one of my friends who came top in first year how he'd revised

as he seemed to be way calmer and just naturally understood things he told me that his secret wasn't his intelligence

but his appreciation that you're probably never gonna know every single thing when you're tested but that's okay

because that's kind of the point of exams to separate the top performers from everybody else he told me that he

looked at learning anything like an ongoing journey well you might need to go back the way you came a few times or

try some different routes to help you understand what you're studying and once you've found the fastest route and you

do understand that topic you'll be able to get to the end way quicker and work everything else out when it matters now

this was maybe a little bit philosophical but if we look at the research we know that learning anything

isn't a straight line learning is both discursive and recursive meaning we need to digress from what we're learning and

then we need to get back over what we're learning to really make that learning stick the work of herman ebenhaus and

the forgetting curve shows that memories are consolidated most effectively when we come back and test our knowledge

after a period of time and this is where the concept of spaced repetition comes from and we also know from bloom's

taxonomy that simply memorizing facts is just the start of your journey to mastering whatever you're learning as

then you need to understand what you're learning and then apply it as you move up the pyramid so top performing

learners will not just memorize things from flashcards but will actively read around topics and relate new content to

what they already know to more deeply understand things and be on a continuous journey of actively asking themselves do

i actually understand this topic and can i explain it in simple terms now i'm also on a journey to grow a community of

high performing learners through this channel so do consider hitting that subscribe button to be part of that

journey and we'll now look more deeply into this concept of deeply understanding topics and being able to

apply knowledge in our next study technique which is all about having eureka moments now the idea of having a

eureka moment comes from a story about ancient greek polymath archimedes in the story archimedes was asked by the local

king to determine whether a crown was pure gold or whether he'd been cheated by the goldsmith who'd made it

archimedes was going crazy as he couldn't figure out a solution and then during a trip to a public bath

archimedes noted that water was displaced when his body sank into the bath and in particular he noted that the

volume of water displaced equaled the volume of his own body immersed in the water he'd just discovered how to

measure the volume of an irregular object and he worked out that if you place the weight of gold equal to that

of the crown into a basin filled to the brim with water and then remove the gold and replace it with the king's actual

crown if the water rose higher and overflowed with the crowd in it they could be certain that the goldsmith had

cheated the king now when he figured out how to solve this problem archimedes allegedly leapt out of the bath and ran

home naked shouting eureka meaning i found it and it's these eureka moments that the top performing learners focus

on rather than spending time trying to memorize everything about a topic they'll look to find the key concepts

that will unlock their deeper understanding of that topic in educational research these eureka or

light bulb moments are termed threshold concepts which is a term outlined by land mayor and cousins in research

published between 2003 and 2005. in this work which originally looked at understanding economics threshold

concepts are described as core concepts that once understood transform a student's understanding of a whole

subject and suddenly they're able to see it in a way that they weren't able to before these concepts are often hard or

troublesome for learners to grasp but when they do they unlock related topics and the subject seems way easier for

instance concepts like gravity may unlock understanding in areas of physics photosynthesis unlocks related topics in

biology and blood circulation unlocks much of cardiovascular disease and anatomy in medicine so these are not

just hard to grasp facts they're concepts or principles that sit at the heart of what you're trying to learn and

top performers will actively look for these threshold concepts and eureka moments that will help them to more

deeply understand things and this all links back to top performers being better at encoding information and being

more efficient with how they learn in general if they can unlock hard threshold topics first everything else

will seem more relatable and will be more easily encoded to this existing knowledge than trying to learn facts in

isolation but how do top performers actually deeply understand what they're learning and actually have these moments

when other learners don't well for that let's look at study technique number three which is all about focused and

diffuse thinking most students know how important is to focus but if i told you that top performers actually daydream

and spend time relaxing to learn other problems would you actually believe me well most people try and stay focused

for long hours in the library and focus on reading their notes focused thinking is a highly attentive state of mind

where the brain uses its concentration abilities in the prefrontal cortex to ignore all extraneous information and

because of this it's a preferred method for studying and memorizing knowledge intensive subjects when we're in our

focus mode of thinking it's like we have a one-track mind for the matter at hand and whether we're practicing a specific

skill or working through a specific math problem focused thinking allows us to directly zoom in on the most pertinent

information now top performers are definitely able to focus and they build habits to prevent procrastination as

we'll see shortly but they'll also use something called diffuse thinking diffuse thinking doesn't zoom in on one

particular thing rather it looks at the big picture and that fifty thousand foot view of a task topic or problem diffuse

thinking happens when you let your mind wander freely making those random connections that are

essential for creativity your brain has the opportunity to consider all information and therefore connect the

dots outside of that limited hyper-focused view now usually we employ diffuse thinking when we do non-work

tasks like taking a shower or going for a run but and here's the interesting thing while focused thinking is most

often employed when we work or study our greatest creativity and problem solving happens when we're thinking diffusely

just think about archimedes he had his eureka moment not while banging his head against the wall focusing on how to work

out the problem the problem came to him when he was relaxed having a bath an experiment published in nature looked at

subjects who were taught a complicated algorithm for solving a math problem secretly however there was a much easier

way to solve that same problem which none of the subjects discovered first time around when they were retested 12

hours later before going to sleep some figured out that easier method but others didn't but if you tested them

after a night's sleep at the same interval of 12 hours the rate of discovery of this easier method of

solving the problem more than doubles suggesting that while sleeping our brains better connect information and

help us to solve problems while we sleep so top performers will make sure they stay efficient and will take breaks

exercise and get sufficient sleep to give themselves time to think diffusely and more deeply understand what they're

learning in addition to laser focused study sessions which tackle those high yield threshold concepts diffuse

thinking also links back to learning being a journey and us needing to go over certain topics again and again to

deeply learn things and this brings us to study technique 4 of high performance which is all about focus and chunking

the way that we learn depends on our brains focusing on something and bringing it to our attention and then

this concept enters our working memory and then we encode it and store into our long-term memory now i've talked about

the concept of cognitive load before and the fact that our working memory can only hold seven items at a time so if we

get overloaded we're less likely to remember what we're studying top performers know this and we'll learn

efficiently by focusing on the most high yield and challenging information first and things like the threshold concepts

like we mentioned when focusing top performers will get excited about learning and will have a set routine

that beats procrastination and helps them to study effectively for focused periods of time now i had to study for

surgical exams while working as a surgeon my time spent studying had to be efficient and i'd sometimes need to

study around on-call periods or at work when it was easy to get distracted one thing i've seen in everyone who does

well at exams or is efficient at learning anything is that they'll look at the big picture and what they need to

learn and will then break down what they need to learn into smaller chunks of information or group topics together to

save time for exams this might include mapping out an exam timetable that breaks big topics down and will also

break down complex topics into bite-sized chunks to aid in coding once they've mapped out how and when they're

going to study they'll form a habit by studying at a similar time each day or in a similar location at regular

intervals and will reward themselves for hitting their study goals and this focus applies to how they approach learning

book chapters and their daily study routine which we'll look at in technique number five now the top performers and

most efficient learners won't just be laser focused but will also build regular habits that they use all the

time that help them to learn pretty much anything when learning something most of us will also be attending lectures or

learning online or learning from experiences at work or in school but what a lot of us don't do that the top

performers do do is spend time ahead of those learning opportunities to prime our knowledge and get the most out of

those learning experiences when it matters now i've been guilty of this myself as it's easy to just rock up to a

lecture and expect to be spoon fed or feel productive taking notes but actually this isn't very efficient and

it's a bit of a waste of time while many students will stood in a lecture learning things top performers will

spend time before the lecture reading what's going to come up and actively testing their knowledge so that they can

get the most out of that learning event and this doesn't just apply to lectures if you're learning from a textbook or a

video priming is our ability to look at a piece of information and quickly scan the text first rather than take it all

in at once and get a framework on how to approach learning and the material we want to know before we actually start

learning it top performers will scan headings diagrams important images and example questions to give a simple

overview of how the big picture comes together rather than getting sucked into all the detail they'll scan and skim

read for those eureka moments and prime their existing knowledge so that new information can be more easily encoded

if you're interested in seeing this in action i have a great video i'll link to where i go through how i encode

effectively and mind mapping is also a great way to map out those big topics at a 50 000 foot view but encoding is only

part of learning effectively and top performers also do something else that many other lovers don't and that's all

about using active recall effectively so study technique number six of top performing learners is that every single

top performer actively engages with the content that they're learning and they spend the majority of their time testing

their knowledge and identifying weaknesses ahead of any tests or exams one of my friends who aced her surgical

exams in med school would never take any notes and only wrote out active recall questions during lectures when i first

saw her doing this i thought it was pretty nuts but after i started doing it myself my grades went through the roof

and i never took notes ever again while passive note-taking makes you feel productive if you're not actively

engaging with what you're learning and noting down questions you perceive will be hard you're unlikely to learn things

effectively in cognitive research psychologists talk about the primary learning event as a key opportunity to

engage with topics and learn efficiently when i had to learn lots of information around my day job as a surgeon for exams

like the mrcs i'd go direct to doing active recall questions in focused study sessions and chunked these up based on

the surgical specialty i was learning by using past papers and question banks i was ensuring that the information i was

learning was relevant meaningful and in the same format as the exam but i was also making sure that it challenged me

at the appropriate difficulty level in video games getting players hooked and engaged depends on the controls the

difficulty level and the feedback loops to get players into a flow state where they love playing that game and it's the

same for learning and top performers know this whether reading and asking themselves questions about what they can

remember from the last paragraph of text or testing their peers in a group learning session the top performers will

all default to using active recall a literature review from kent state and duke university in 2013 which analyzed

hundreds of separate studies about effective revision techniques concluded that active recall was better than mind

mapping and note taking since it's extremely efficient for committing details and ideas into your memory and

in 2011 jeffrey carpet and researchers split 80 students into four groups with each student tasked with learning the

same material before being tested on what they'd learned in both the verbatim test when asked to recall facts as well

as the inference test when asked to recall topics and concepts the active recall group significantly outperformed

the other groups this study showed that testing yourself just once is more effective and meaningful than rereading

a chapter four times but there's one final thing that top learners do that few others do and that is whenever they

finished a primary learning event or even finished an exam they'll reflect back on their process and aim to get

better reflection and reviewing information after learning is absolutely essential herman ebinghaus noted the

most effective way to reduce the effects of the forgetting curve and retain information for longer is to use active

recall to test all knowledge at set intervals after that initial learning event top performers don't just use

space repetition with flashcards though when i worked as a trauma and orthopedic surgeon i was lucky enough to work with

some amazing surgical trainers and one of the best pieces of advice that i received early on was to write out a

short reflection at the end of every operation when i was writing up the operation note this would immediately

get me thinking what went well and what i can improve upon next time and it also meant that i'd replay the steps

immediately in my mind along with how i felt to help personalize the learning experience and remember things for

longer in fact that same surgeon i was training under had done this throughout his career and still did it to the day

he told me and he was one of the best surgeons i'd ever worked with when reflecting and reviewing topics top

performers will deliberately mix review methods in a similar way writing reflective piece or teaching someone

else or creating recall questions or a mind map will be far more effective than simply rereading your old notes taken at

the original learning event as they're more active and much more challenging which our brains engage with the other

important point to take from this example is that it's key to review new information within 12 hours of that

original event this is based on the research of evening house again and making a habit of reflecting and

reviewing is something that all top performing students do whether that's reviewing the previous day's study

sessions main points through active recall and asking yourself what can you remember at the start of your next study

session or ending every single day with a daily review making reflection and reviewing what you're learning is study

technique number seven now as a bonus eighth study technique of top performing students i'm actually including what i

believe is the most important study technique and it takes us all the way back to study technique number one which

is that learning is a journey stanford psychology professor carol dweck has shown that while talents like sporting

ability or intelligence have some elements of genetics related to them they're by no means fixed and everyone

is capable of improving top performers understand that they need to have a growth mindset and that hard work beats

talent when talent doesn't work hard by watching this video you're already taking responsibility for your learning

by actually learning how to learn which is great but very few people do this if they get a bad test score they take it

personally and get upset while also blaming everybody except themselves when you're learning anything there will be

ups and downs as with any journey but people who take responsibility while not taking things too personally and then

focus on getting better we'll see the most gains and this growth mindset is an absolute superpower people like charles

darwin whose theory of evolution has made him one of the most influential figures in history are often thought of

as geniuses you may be surprised to learn that darwin actually flunked out of med school and ended up to his

father's horror heading out on around the world voyage as a ship's naturalist now out on his own darwin was then able

to look with fresh eyes at the data he was collecting approaching material with the goal of learning it on your own can

give you a unique path to mastery often no matter how good your teacher or textbook are it's only when you do

things by yourself and look at other books or videos that you begin to see that what you learnt from a single

teacher or book is only a partial version of the full subject which has links to still other fascinating topics

that you're choosing taking responsibility for your own learning is one of the most important things that

you can do and will help you to build confidence to learn anything now sometimes bad teachers might even tell

you that you can't do something or that you're just not that smart well top performers believe in their own ability

to learn and ignore this negativity and focus on being the best they can be so to summarize the seven study techniques

of top performing students are learning is a journey having eureka moments having focused and diffused thinking

using chunking and good encoding priming your knowledge ahead of learning using active recall at all times reflecting on

everything and as a bonus eighth study tip taking responsibility for your own learning now i hope you found this video

useful on your own learning journey as i mentioned i'm trying to build a community of top performers who are

obsessed with learning and studying more effectively so if that's you do consider hitting the subscribe button and let me

know in the comments below or by reaching out via my website if there are any other techniques you'd like to see

covered to help you learn more efficiently and effectively and i'll catch you again next time