Mastering Six Levels of Thinking for Academic Success

there are six levels or types of thinking that every student or learner of any age should master and each of

these six levels leads to a different level of result unfortunately most of the students I work with stuck in these

first few levels of thinking and the reason that they struggle to reach top results is because they are thinking at

the wrong level when this happens it causes a lot of stress it wastes a lot of time it can be very frustrating it

feel impossible to reach top results with any degree of confidence and with enough time we can start thinking that

maybe we're just not cut out for it but that probably is not true and for me learning how to think deliberately at

the right level is one of the main reasons I was able to achieve top academic results in both medical school

and for my masters of education and trust me I'm certainly not a genius I've seen similar results with thousands of

students and professionals that have trained over years and by the end of this video you'll be able to see what

level you tend to operate at and how you can get to the level that you need to be and FYI the level you need to be is

probably higher than you think but we'll get to that later so the first level is all about memorizing things this

involves a lot of rereading uh rewriting it is usually very repetitive it can feel very tedious it often makes us feel

drowsy and this level is called remember it is the level of roote learning and repeating hundreds and

thousands of flash cards this is the way I and maybe you studied for like most of High School uh and it's maybe the reason

why you might have hated studying and when you do this level of thinking and studying then it unlocks level one

result which is regurgitate the regurgitate level is all about listing defining stating facts

it's the kinds of questions that are less common as you go through our University and become semi useless in

professional life confusingly even though this first level is called remember it's actually not a very good

way to hold on to and retain the things that you learn uh but we'll talk about that later the second level of learning

is about really trying to comprehend what you are learning rather than just like repeatedly smash it into your brain

this is the level that we call understand now there's a reason I've been saying these are levels of thinking

uh and not different levels of studying and that's because your intentions really matter you could have two people

doing exactly the same technique and for someone looking at you it can look exactly the same and then when you ask

them hey how are you studying they might both just say I'm just reading my textbook but mentally it's different for

the person at level one by reading they actually mean mean I'm reading it again and again so I can try to get it stuck

in my head whereas for the person in level two what they mean is I'm reading it so I can understand what it's trying

to say and wrap my head around it and so naturally at level two thinking understand what we unlock is level two

result which is explain this allows us to answer questions that require us to explain our

understanding of a concept or a process these these types of questions often make up the bulk of most assessments up

until around later in uni now if this is sounding familiar to you so far it's because it's described in a framework

called Bloom's revised taxonomy which was first published in 1956 and then later revised in 2001 and

even though it is 70 years old uh it is still one of the most underrated principle that most students have never

heard of and if you have heard of it stick around because I'll teach you a way of using it that helped me double my

learning efficiency so level three is about using what you have leared to then solve problems and this is a level that

we call apply now this is where things can get a little bit confusing because a lot of people misunderstand this about

Bloom's tonomy there are lots of different ways that you can apply your knowledge to solve problems so for

example you have what we I would say are simple problems uh these are the types of problems where you learn something

and then you just directly use that thing that you learned to solve a problem so for example in math or

physics you learn an equation or formula and there is a problem that you need to solve by just using that equation or

formula then again there are what I might call a little bit more advanced problems and these are the ones where

you actually have to think about the best way to tackle the problem there are a combination of Concepts that you need

to apply in a certain sequence and there's a lot more strategic thinking involved at level three we are mostly

talking about the first one simple problem solving and so we unlock that level which is the simple problem

solving result we're now able to solve what I call One to One problems where there is one concept you learn and the

problem requires that one concept to solve and you can get to this level level three by just literally solving

questions and solving problems lots of practice papers and quizzes have questions at the apply level for

something more procedural like coding it might be building a simple function with a few simple variables but what about

the harder and more complex questions the types of problems that are Advanced this is where level four thinking comes

in we're entering into the territory of higher order learning people who know how to think at level four tend to do

pretty well but level four thinkers are not common and you'll see why why that is soon level four thinking is all about

comparing and contrasting it's about looking for similarities and differences we call this level analyze it's the

first time that we're not just looking at information by itself but we're looking at it in relation to another

piece of information and there are countless techniques that help with level four analyze Vin diagrams making

tables making summaries that explain the similarities and differences using mind maps so in problems and questions that

force you to compare one Concept in relation to another all of these things are going to be helpful really any

technique is effective as long as it forces you to compare and contrast one thing against another thing so unlocking

level four accesses the level four result which is the comparison level and instead of just giving you some examples

of what comparison looks like like I'm going to do one bit and show you this great little study tip that you can use

go on to something like chbt or Gemini and type in this prompt give me questions at the educational stage that

you want so let's say second year university level for the subject so let's say in this example we'll say uh

microbiology at blooms revised taxonomy level in this case it's going to be level four and these are exactly the

types of questions that test you at level four and you'll see that every single option forces you to compare

ideas against each other now the reason that this technique is actually useful to use in your studying is because

Bloom's revised taxonomy was not created for people like you like a learner they were created for educators and exam

writers and internationally almost every single curriculum is designed around Bloom's taxonomy or a similar taxonomy

they're all pretty similar to each other which means your exam writer is thinking in this way to create the questions that

are going to filter out the good versus the great Learners which means you can now predict the types of questions

they're going to ask you and even create your own practice papers but here is why level four thinkers are not common as

soon as you jump from level three to level four you will 100% notice that this level of thinking requires more

mental effort it is harder to do you're thinking for longer and more deeply than the previous levels which is a good

thing because it means that your brain is forming deeper knowledge and stronger memory but it can feel like you've

gotten slower and some people think that that means they're doing something wrong so even though most students can think

at level four most students choose not to because it doesn't feel as easy this is a phenomenon called the

misinterpreted effort hypothesis and it prevents the majority of Learners from ever really improving and this is even

more the case at level five level five thinking is for the top Learners if you can think at level five you will be

reaching those top results it's also the level that people find the most confusing so I'm going to make it really

simple for you level five is all about Judgment at level four we analyzed we compared and contrasted we found

similarities and differences at level five we're asking so what what does it matter who cares why is it important

level five is called evaluate and learning to think at this level unlocks the level five result

which is prioritize so let's do that little AI trick again and see the difference in

the types of questions we get so you can see level four on the left and level five on the right so notice that at

level five we are forming conclusions and now we have to justify it it's not enough like at level four just to know

that there are similarities and differences we then have to use that knowledge to make a decision level five

thinking takes much more effort uh and you'll know that you are doing it right when you are going back and forth

between the material trying to answer the question in your head of why does this matter how does it fit in with

everything else why do I need to care you're going to be jumping between your lectures and your textbook and doing a

Google search these are the signs that you are operating at level five and it's not as easy as the previous levels but

to reach level five results you need to go through this and level four and level five are the types of questions and

challenges you'll find in second and third year university and Beyond on uh and in postgrad studies most of what

you're assist at is level four and level five also pretty much any senior position in any profession will require

you to have level four and level five thinking and much like before it's less about what your Technique looks like and

more about what's happening inside your brain for example for level five mind maps uh teaching answering questions uh

creating summaries these are all techniques that are great for level five but you could also do all of those

techniques and still not do it at level five if you're not thinking in the right way for example it's easy to make a mind

map just connecting a bunch of lines and arrows together between words forming a few groups and categories here and there

and just call it done but that's not level five thinking it's very different to for example creating a mind map where

you're critically evaluating which lines and relationships are more important than other possible relationships and

you're thinking what is the best way I can group these ideas together mentally it's a very different process even

though physically it can look very similar now level six I'll go through this one pretty quickly because finally

enough it's actually less important for most people level six is about creating a hypothesis it's about synthesizing new

and novel information from what you already know this level is called create and when you unlock create it unlocks

the level six result which is hypothesize now some people think that level six create is any situation where

you have to generate anything with your knowledge uh this is not true it's only level six if you are creating a answer

for something that you don't think the answer exists in your knowledge already you're identifying a gap and you're

creating a potential answer that makes sense based on what you do know and the reason level six is not as important as

the previous levels is because most people will not really be assisted uh at level six unless you are at the highest

levels of Education or your profession most people in their daily lives will be at the top of their game just being able

to perform at level five consistently but just for your knowledge here are some examples of level six and as you

can see it's pretty Advanced you can pause to read this a little bit more if you like or you can jump onto your AI

and do this for your own subject now here's the part that is going to blow your mind if you want to get to level

five and level six there are actually two different methods to get there the first way is to start studying and just

to go through each level from bottom to top first you remember it and then you understand it and then you apply it and

then you analyze it so on and so forth this sounds very logical but for most people this will not work the problem

with starting at the bottom mastering level one then mastering level two then mastering level three Etc is that it is

very very time consuming and most people do not have enough time to even reach level five let alone Master it so in

reality most people will just do a little bit of each level kind of back and forth like for example in lectures

they might be doing little bit of level one and then a little bit of level two and then later when doing some quizzes

they might be doing a bit of level two and a little bit of level three and just sort of moving back and forth if they do

a more challenging question they'll be doing a little bit of level four and then level five and this doesn't really

work very well because we will always forget things over time in research we call this phenomenon knowledge Decay it

occurs because the memory has something called a forgetting curve so basically while you're doing level two and level

three our knowledge of level one will slowly Decay away right we're going to forget it and so instead of being able

to actually just move up the levels we're going to be spending most of our time just relearning the things that we

continuously forget so instead here is the better way to reach the higher levels instead of starting at level one

and moving up we're going to start at level five and actually move down remember level five because level six is

not relevant for most people and the reason this works is because our brain actually processes information and forms

memory more strongly at level five than it does at level one and when we set our sights at the top our brain will

actually fill in and achieve the lower levels of results along the way as almost like a side effect and this

doesn't work the other way around if we are trying to just learn so that we can regurgitate material our brain is not

going to then be able to automatically compare or prioritize information but if we are trying to compare and prioritize

then we will gain better memory so that we can if we need to regurgitate explain and solve problems now by the way the

science on this gets a little bit complicated so if you want me to go deeper in on this then let me know in

the comments like I said level five takes more mental effort but it pays off big time by forgetting less so this

means when we start studying don't focus on trying to remember or understand Focus most of your attention on trying

to evaluate which forces you to understand and analyze it in the first place now if you found this video useful

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