This type of “knowledge collapse” seems to occur when your mind is restructuring its understanding—building a more solid foundation. In the case of language learners, they experience occasional periods when the foreign language suddenly seems as comprehensible as Klingon.
Remember—it takes time to assimilate new knowledge. You will go through some periods when you seem to take an exasperating step backward in your understanding. This a natural phenomenon that means your mind is wrestling deeply with the material. You’ll find that when you emerge from these periods of temporary frustration, your knowledge base will take a surprising step forward.
Getting Your Act Together—Organizing Your Materials
In preparation for a test, have your problems and solutions neatly organized so you can go over them quickly. Some students tape handwritten solutions to problems on the relevant pages of their textbook so everything is readily available. (Use painter’s masking tape or sticky notes if you plan to later return a book.) The handwritten solution is important because writing by hand increases the odds that what is written will be retained in memory. Alternatively, keep a binder handy with important problems and solutions from the class and the book, so you can go over them again before tests.
WORDS OF WISDOM ABOUT REMEMBERING FROM ONE OF HISTORY’S GREATEST PSYCHOLOGISTS
“A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning by heart (for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once more.”
—William James, writing in 189012
Testing Is a Powerful Learning Experience—Give Yourself Little Mini-Tests Constantly
Here’s one of the most important reasons to have well-chunked solution methods readily in mind: They help prevent choking on tests. Choking—panicking to the point where you freeze—can happen when your working memory is filled to capacity, yet you still don’t have enough room for the additional critical pieces you need to solve a problem. Chunking compresses your knowledge and makes room in your working memory for those pieces so you don’t go into mental overload so easily. Also, by making more room in your working memory, you have a better chance of remembering important problem-solving details.13
Practicing like this is a form of mini-testing. Research has shown that testing isn’t just a means of measuring how much you know. Testing in itself is a powerful learning experience. It changes and adds to what you know, also making dramatic improvements in your ability to retain the material.14 This improvement in knowledge because of test taking is called the testing effect. It seems to occur because testing strengthens and stabilizes the related neural patterns in your brain. This is precisely what we saw in chapter 4, in the “Practice Makes Permanent” section, with the picture of the darkening patterns in the brain that occurs with repetition.15
Improvement because of the testing effect occurs even when the test performance is bad and no feedback is given. When you are self-testing while you are studying, however, you want to do your best to get feedback and check your answers using solutions manuals, the back of the book, or wherever the solution may lie. Also, as we’ll discuss later, interaction with peers as well as instructors helps with the learning process.16
One reason why building solid chunks is so helpful is that you get plenty of mini-tests in while you are creating those chunks. Studies have shown that students, and even educators, are often shockingly unaware of the benefits of this kind of mini-testing through retrieval practice.17
Students think they are just checking how well they’re doing when they do a mini-test of their recall. But this active test of recall is one of the best learning methods—better than just sitting passively and rereading! By building your library of chunks, with plenty of active practicing at retrieving material over and over again, and testing your recall, you are using some of the best methods possible for learning deeply and well.
NOW YOU TRY!
Build a Mental Solution Library
A key to building mental flexibility and expertise is to build your library of chunked solution patterns. This is your rapid-access data bank—always handy in a pinch. This idea isn’t just useful for math and science problems—it applies to many areas in life. That’s why, for example, it’s always a good strategy to look at where the emergency exits are relative to your seat on an airplane or your room in a hotel.
SUMMING IT UP
Chunking means integrating a concept into one smoothly connected neural thought pattern.
Chunking helps increase the amount of working memory you have available.
Building a chunked library of concepts and solutions helps build intuition in problem solving.
When you are building a chunked library, it’s important to keep deliberate focus on some of the toughest concepts and aspects of problem solving.
Occasionally you can study hard and fate deals a bad hand. But remember the Law of Serendipity: If you prepare well by practicing and building a good mental library, you will find that luck will be increasingly on your side. In other words, you guarantee failure if you don’t try, but those who consistently give it a good effort will experience many more successes.
PAUSE AND RECALL
What were the main ideas of this chapter? Almost no one can remember a lot of details, and that’s okay. You’ll be surprised to see how fast your learning progresses if you begin to encapsulate ideas related to what you are learning into a few key chunks.
ENHANCE YOUR LEARNING
1. What does chunking have to do with working memory?
2. Why do you need to solve a problem yourself as part of the chunking process? Why can’t you just look at the solution in the back of the book, understand it, and then move on? What are some additional things you can do to help smooth your chunks right before a test?
3. What is the testing effect?
4. Once you’ve practiced a problem a few times, pause and see if you can sense the feeling of rightness that occurs when you realize what the next step in the solution process is.
5. What is the Law of Serendipity? Think of an example from your own experiences that typifies this idea.
6. How does choking differ from knowledge collapse?
7. Students fool themselves into thinking that they are learning best by rereading the material instead of by testing themselves through recall. How can you keep yourself from falling into this common trap?
NEEL SUNDARESAN, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF EBAY RESEARCH LABS, ON INSPIRATION AND THE PATH TO SUCCESS IN MATH AND SCIENCE
Dr. Neel Sundaresan is the creator of the Inspire! program to help students succeed in science, engineering, math, and technology. Some Inspire! scholars—a group of freshmen from disadvantaged backgrounds—recently filed their first patent, which provided a critical intellectual property asset for mobile commerce for eBay. Dr. Sundaresan’s own story provides insight into his path to success.
“I did not go to an elite school when I was growing up. In fact, my school was below average—we didn’t have the proper teachers for many subjects. But I focused on finding something good in whatever teachers came my way, whether it was an excellent memory or simply an easy smile. This kind of positive attitude helped me appreciate my teachers and keep an open-minded approach toward my classes.
“This same attitude also helped me later in my career. Today, I always actively seek inspiration from the people I work with and for. Whenever I find my spirit bending low, I discover it is because I have stopped looking for people’s positive attributes. This means it is time for me to look within and make changes.
“I know this sounds clichéd, but my main inspiration has always
been my mother. She was not allowed to study beyond middle school because she would have had to leave her small town to complete high school. She grew up during an exciting but dangerous time in India’s struggle for independence. The doors that shut for my mother have made me determined to open doors for others, to help them realize the enormous opportunities that can be so close to their grasp.
“One of my mother’s Golden Rules was that ‘writing is the foundation of learning.’ From grade school through doctoral studies, I have found immense power in systematically understanding and writing each step of what I really wanted to learn.
“When I was a graduate student, I used to see other students vigorously highlighting steps in proofs or sentences in a passage of a book. I never understood this. Once you highlight, in some sense, you have destroyed the original without any guarantee that you have placed it inside you, where it can flower.
“My own experiences, then, echo the research findings you are learning about in this book. Highlighting should be avoided because, at least in my experience, it provides only an illusion of competence. Retrieval practice is far more powerful. Try to get the main ideas of each page you are reading cemented in your mind before you turn the page.
“I generally liked to work on my more difficult subjects, like math, in the morning, when I was fresh. I still practice this approach today. I have some of my best mental breakthroughs in the bathroom and shower—it’s when I take my mind off the subject that the diffuse mode is able to work its magic.”
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tools, tips, and tricks
As noted management specialist David Allen points out, “We trick ourselves into doing what we ought to be doing. . . . To a great degree, the highest-performing people I know are those who have installed the best tricks in their lives . . . The smart part of us sets up things for us to do that the not-so-smart part responds to almost automatically, creating behavior that produces high-performance results.”1
Allen is referring to tricks like wearing exercise clothes to help him get into the mood for exercising or placing an important report by the front door so he can’t miss it. One constant refrain I hear from students is that putting themselves in new surroundings—such as the quiet section of a library, which has few interrupting cues—works wonders with procrastination. Research has confirmed that a special place devoted just to working is particularly helpful.2
Another trick involves using meditation to help you learn to ignore distracting thoughts.3 (Meditation is not just for New Age types—a lot of science has revealed its value.4) A short, helpful guide to getting started with meditation is Buddha in Blue Jeans by Tai Sheridan. It’s free as an electronic book and is suitable for people of any faith. And of course there are many meditation apps—just Google around to see what looks workable for you.
A last important trick is to reframe your focus. One student, for example, is able to get himself up at four thirty each weekday morning, not by thinking about how tired he is when he wakes but about how good breakfast will be.
One of the most extraordinary stories of reframing is that of Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes. Bannister was a medical school student who couldn’t afford a trainer or a special runner’s diet. He didn’t even have time to run more than thirty minutes a day, squeezed in around his medical studies. Yet Bannister did not focus on all the reasons why he logically had no chance of reaching his goal. He instead refocused on accomplishing his goal in his own way. On the morning he made world history, he got up, ate his usual breakfast, did his required hospital rounds, and then caught a bus to the track.
It’s nice to know that there are positive mental tricks you can use to your advantage. They make up for some of the negative tricks you can play that either don’t work or make things more difficult for you, like telling yourself that you can polish off your homework just before it’s due.
It’s normal to sit down with a few negative feelings about beginning your work. It’s how you handle those feelings that matters. Researchers have found that the difference between slow and fast starters is that the nonprocrastinating fast starters put their negative thinking aside, saying things to themselves like, “Quit wasting time and just get on with it. Once you get it going, you’ll feel better about it.”5
A POSITIVE APPROACH TO PROCRASTINATION
“I tell my students they can procrastinate as long as they follow three rules:
1. No going onto the computer during their procrastination time. It’s just too engrossing.
2. Before procrastinating, identify the easiest homework problem. (No solving is necessary at this point.)
3. Copy the equation or equations that are needed to solve the problem onto a small piece of paper and carry the paper around until they are ready to quit procrastinating and get back to work.
“I have found this approach to be helpful because it allows the problem to linger in diffuse mode—students are working on it even while they are procrastinating.”
—Elizabeth Ploughman, Lecturer of Physics, Camosun College, Victoria, British Columbia
Self-Experimentation: The Key to a Better You
Dr. Seth Roberts is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. While learning to perform experiments as a graduate student, he began to experiment on himself. Roberts’s first self-experiment involved his acne. A dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline, so Roberts simply counted the number of pimples he had on his face with varying doses of tetracycline. The result? The tetracycline made no difference on the number of pimples he had!
Roberts had stumbled across a finding that would take medicine another decade to discover—that seemingly powerful tetracycline, which has unsafe side effects, doesn’t necessarily work on acne. On the other hand, benzoyl peroxide cream did work, contrary to what Roberts had originally thought. As Roberts noted, “From my acne research I learned that self-experimentation can be used by non-experts to (a) see if the experts are right and (b) learn something they don’t know. I hadn’t realized such things were possible.”6 Over the years, Roberts has used his self-experimentation efforts to study his mood, control his weight, and to see the effects of omega-3 on how well his brain functioned.
Overall, Roberts has found that self-experimentation is extremely helpful in testing ideas as well as in generating and developing new hypotheses. As he notes: “By its nature, self-experimentation involves making sharp changes in your life: you don’t do X for several weeks, then you do X for several weeks. This, plus the fact that we monitor ourselves in a hundred ways, makes it easy for self-experimentation to reveal unexpected side effects. . . . Moreover, daily measurements of acne, sleep, or anything else, supply a baseline that makes it even easier to see unexpected changes.”7
Your own self-experimentation, at least to begin with, should be on procrastination. Keep notes on when you don’t complete what you had intended to complete, what the cues are, and your zombie-mode habitual reaction to procrastination cues. By logging your reaction, you can apply the subtle pressure you need to change your response to your procrastination cues and gradually improve your working habits. In his excellent book The Now Habit, author Neil Fiore suggests keeping a detailed daily schedule of your activities for a week or two to get a handle on where your problem areas are for procrastination.8 There are many different ways to monitor your behavior. The most important idea here is that keeping a written history over several weeks appears to be critical in helping you make changes. Also, different people function better in certain environments—some need a busy coffee shop, while others need a quiet library. You need to figure out what’s best for you.
ISOLATION VERSUS GROUP WORK—TREATING PROCRASTINATION DIFFERENTLY THAN SIMPLY STRUGGLING TO UNDERSTAND
“A tip I have to address procrastination is to isolate yourself from things you know will distract you, including people. Go to a r
oom all alone, or the library so you do not have anything to distract you.”
—Aukury Cowart, sophomore, electrical engineering
“If I’m struggling in a subject, I find it helpful to study with other people from the same class. That way I can ask questions and we can work together to figure out what we are confused on. Chances are I might know what he or she is confused about and vice versa.”
—Michael Pariseau, junior, mechanical engineering
Ultimate Zombie Alliance: The Planner-Journal as Your Personal Lab Notebook
The best way for you to gain control of your habits is simple: Once a week, write a brief weekly list of key tasks. Then, each day, write a list of the tasks that you can reasonably work on or accomplish. Try to write this daily task list the evening before.
Why the day before? Research has shown this helps your subconscious to grapple with the tasks on the list so you figure out how to accomplish them.9 Writing the list before you go to sleep enlists your zombies to help you accomplish the items on the list the next day.
Most people use their phone or an online or paper calendar to keep track of important due dates—you are probably using such a system. From your “due date” calendar, write down a weekly to-do list of twenty or fewer key items. Each night, create the next day’s daily to-do list from the items on the weekly to-do list. Keep it to five to ten items. Try not to add to the daily list once you’ve made it unless it involves some unanticipated but important item (you don’t want to start creating endless lists). Try to avoid swapping out items on your list.
If you don’t write your tasks down in a list, they lurk at the edge of the four-or-so slots in your working memory, taking up valuable mental real estate.
A Mind For Numbers Page 11