7 Study Techniques of Top Performing Learners for Effective Learning
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Introduction
Have you ever wondered what sets the top 1% of learners apart when it comes to studying for exams? It’s easy to attribute their success to intelligence or some innate ability. However, through my years of studying—first as a medical student and later as a surgeon—I have guided countless learners and discovered that effective learners share common habits and techniques. In this article, we will explore seven powerful study techniques that you can implement right now to elevate your learning game and achieve better results in exams.
1. Understanding Learning as a Journey
The first habit of top-performing learners is their understanding that learning is not a straightforward path; rather, it’s a messy, ongoing journey. Instead of getting overwhelmed by the idea of knowing every detail, successful learners embrace the concept that not knowing everything is okay. They recognize that exams are designed to differentiate between those who understand the core concepts versus those who just memorize facts.
Exploring the Learning Journey
- Embrace Messiness: Understanding that learning is discursive; you may need to revisit topics several times.
- Deeper Understanding: Focus on gaining a solid grasp on fundamental concepts rather than rote memorization.
- Research Backing: Studies suggest using spaced repetition to enhance memory retention.
2. Embracing Eureka Moments
Top learners actively seek out those eureka moments—breakthroughs in understanding that often transform a student’s approach to a subject. This technique relates significantly to the concept of threshold concepts, as proposed by educational researchers.
Achieving Eureka Moments
- Identify Core Concepts: Focus on difficult concepts that unlock understanding in broader areas.
- Creative Problem Solving: Utilize moments of relaxation to let your thoughts wander and connect information.
- Application of Concepts: Use threshold concepts as a foundation to make learning more relatable and manageable.
3. Balancing Focused and Diffuse Thinking
While intense focus is crucial during study sessions, top performers also leverage diffuse thinking, allowing their minds to wander. This dual approach fosters creativity and enhances problem-solving capabilities.
Implementing Focused and Diffuse Thinking
- Focused Thinking: Engage deeply with a subject to absorb critical information directly.
- Diffuse Thinking: When at rest or doing routine tasks, let your mind create connections between ideas.
- Maximize Creativity: Studies show that novel solutions often arise during restful, unstructured thought processes, like after a good night’s sleep.
4. Utilizing Chunking
Top-performing learners systematically organize their study material using chunking, breaking larger topics into bite-sized segments that are easier to digest.
Effective Chunking Strategy
- Group Topics: Break complex subjects into smaller, manageable parts.
- Study Schedule: Create a structured study plan that outlines specific topics to learn each day.
- Track Progress: Regularly assess your understanding of each chunk to reinforce memory.
5. Priming Knowledge Before Learning
Preparing ahead of lectures or study sessions significantly enhances learning outcomes. Top learners often prime their knowledge by previewing content before diving deeper.
How to Prime Effectively
- Skim and Scan: Before engaging with new material, briefly review headings and summaries to build a mental framework.
- Active Preparation: Understand the key concepts that will be discussed to maximize comprehension during lectures.
- Engage with Material: Relate new information to what you already know for better encoding in memory.
6. Practicing Active Recall
Rather than passively taking notes, successful learners engage in active recall, continuously testing their own understanding of the material.
Active Recall Techniques
- Question Banks: Use flashcards or question banks that challenge you and simulate exam conditions.
- Peer Testing: Engage in group study sessions where you quiz each other.
- Efficiency in Learning: Research indicates that active recall dramatically outperforms passive methods like note-taking.
7. Reflecting and Reviewing
A distinct characteristic of effective students is their habit of reflection. After completing a learning session or an exam, taking time to review can solidify what has been learned.
Techniques for Reflection
- End-of-Day Review: Spend a few minutes at the end of each study day to recap what you’ve learned.
- Writing Reflections: Keep a learning journal noting down what went well and areas to improve.
- Regular Intervals: Use spaced repetition to revisit past material as part of a structured review plan.
Bonus Technique: A Growth Mindset
The most successful learners understand that their abilities can be developed through effort and perseverance—a key aspect of having a growth mindset. When faced with setbacks, they don’t shy away but rather reassess and refocus.
Cultivating a Growth Mindset
- Embrace Challenges: View difficulties as opportunities to grow rather than obstacles.
- Seek Feedback: Use critiques to improve rather than take them personally.
- Ownership of Learning: Take responsibility for your education and be proactive in solving learning-related issues.
Conclusion
To summarize, the seven study techniques of top-performing students include: understanding learning as a journey, seeking eureka moments, balancing focused and diffuse thinking, effective chunking, priming knowledge, active recall, and reflecting on learning. As a bonus, implementing a growth mindset can empower you to achieve your academic goals.
I hope this exploration of study techniques proves insightful as you embark on your own learning journey. Consider joining our community by subscribing, as we strive to support each other in becoming top performers. Let’s work together to enhance our study skills and tackle challenges head-on!
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