Comments on: Put Down That Highlighter!

By: Dan Kurt

Dan Kurt — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 19:38:42 +0000

My career has been in a science so this is what worked for me.

Math: doing problems and more problems and more problems from algebra past higher math. Do every problem in the book. It gets easier. Twenty five to thirty problems a day sees to be a good amount

Chemistry and Physics: do the problems and more problems.

Keep in a loose-leaf binder the problems with solutions. Buy more binders.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 16:09:42 +0000

I think you're completely correct that studying a dense text means rereading and pondering. I think it's the pondering that matters most though. You need to struggle with the material to learn it. If the text is sufficiently dense, simply rereading it may be a worthy struggle.

By: William Newman

William Newman — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 15:02:00 +0000

In my experience rereading (and pondering) is not just helpful but nearly essential when studying a subject which can be described in a small dense text. (E.g., Landau and Lifschitz Mechanics, or Spivak Calculus on Manifolds, or the smallest book I have on my shelves, the Stephenson-Yang lecture notes on "sabaki" in the game of Go.) Quite possibly rereading is less helpful in other cases, and quite possibly in those cases people tend to reread too much. But given the existence of cases where (assuming I'm right, despite my lack of controlled experiment) rereading is nearly essential, the "nearly as bad is the practice of rereading [...] much less effective than some of the better techniques" result reported can't be quite correct. Perhaps before trying to state categorically whether rereading is not an effective strategy, the researchers and/or the CreativityPost author should back off and try to define the boundaries of their learning problem more carefully. For comparison, spreading out studying over time really does seem to be helpful in acquiring and retaining knowledge, with no exceptions I can think of. My impression is that that this is a rather general property of thinking and memory, not confined to academic study but also present in e.g. learning sports or learning cooking or learning the geography of an area.