Name: 5 terrible study habits to quit
Uploaded: 2022-10-27T06:24:49.000Z
Duration: 6 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Today, I wanted to talk about all the study techniques that science has proven to be either inefficient or a complete waste of time.

These are the ones that you should avoid using.

I'm a doctor working in California and co-founder of RemNote.

This is another video from our series on evidence-based learning strategies,

where Matty and I take the research in cognitive and neuroscience and show you how to apply it to your studies to get better grades.

So, if that sounds good to you, be sure to subscribe for weekly videos.

In school, we're mainly told what to study, but we aren't always taught how to study.

Most students, including me, start off by just copying what other people do.

We all go through years of trial and error, and many students never end up figuring it out.

In fact, some students gravitate toward the least effective techniques and end up wasting a lot of their time and effort.

Just to demonstrate how poorly students were taught about learning how to learn,

let's look at a few studies by Dr. Jeffrey Karpicke, a professor of cognitive psychology.

So, in this first study, he asked college students to do two things.

First, list all the study techniques that you use, and then, rank them in order by how often you use them.

So, the graph on the left shows that, by far, the most used technique is rereading.

Basically, reading your material over and over as many times as you can in order to study for your exam.

Rereading is one of the worst ways to study, as we'll discuss in just a second,

but as you can see, over 80% of students use this strategy.

And this graph on the right shows that most students rank rereading as their favorite strategy.

And the reason why so many students chose rereading as their favorite strategy

is because they truly thought it was the best way to learn, according to the second study by Roediger and Karpicke.

So, you may have guessed by now that rereading is not that great, but what other strategies should you also avoid?

Well, this study by Dunlosky et al. analyzed hundreds of papers to pinpoint the best and the worst.

They looked at 10 different strategies and found that active recall and spaced repetition were the best, as we already know.

But here are the strategies that they ranked as the worst.

We have rereading, highlighting or underlining, and summarizing.

They also argued that mnemonics also aren't that great because they're difficult to use well and focus more on short-term rather than long-term retention.

So, here's the main reason why these strategies are so ineffective.

Think of learning as consisting of two steps.

Step one is putting the information into your brain, and step two is retrieving that information when you need to use it, like, for solving problems or taking a test.

To study effectively, you need to nail both step one and step two.

Well, rereading, highlighting, and summarizing all help you put the information into your brain, but they don't help you practice retrieving it.

So, the reason why students do so poorly is that they spend all their time with step one, and some students never even practice step two until the day of the test.

If you don't practice the way you're actually going to be tested, you're not gonna do very well.

So, be careful that you don't fall into the trap of spending too much time highlighting and summarizing.

It can be difficult because I know a lot of students love to highlight with all the different colors and make aesthetic summary sheets and share them on Instagram or wherever.

While I think it's great that you're enjoying the learning process, don't forget that if you want to get good grades, you got to practice recalling the information as well.

Peter Brown, author of "make it stick", says that "if you aren't getting the results that you want", chances are "you just aren't testing yourself enough".

Next, I want to talk about some science that we thought would work, but actually turned out to not be that useful.

And it's no surprise because our understanding of psychology and cognitive sciences continue(s) to change very quickly.

So, for example, scientists have recently debunked the myth of learning styles.

Learning styles is the idea that different people learn better in different ways.

For example, some people might be visual learners, some people might be auditory learners, some might be kinesthetic learners, and so on.

Well, these studies by Pashler and McDaniel, and more recently, Husmann and O'Loughlin, show that changing the learning method doesn't make a difference on the students' results.

Dr. Scott Kaufman also states that relying on learning styles could potentially be harmful in that it encourages a fixed mindset rather than a growth mindset.

Another example of science that sounded promising but doesn't actually work is the idea of brain training games.

Companies have built these apps with cognitive games that claim to do things like improve your memory or increase your mental fitness.

Some of them even claim that they can prevent disease(s) like dementia and Alzheimer's.

Well, a study by Owen and Hampshire show(s) that playing brain training games only makes you better at playing brain training games,

but it doesn't actually translate to the memory and cognitive fitness that we were hoping for.

So, in summary, we've just covered a handful of learning strategies that are either ineffective or a complete waste of time.

If you want to learn about the strategies that actually do work, check out the first video in the series; I'll leave a link in the description below.

If this video was helpful for you, please give it a like.

It also really helps us get discovered by more students and spread the knowledge.

For the next video in the series, I want to talk about another skill that we aren't taught much about in school, and that is the science of note-taking.

So, if that sounds interesting to you, be sure to subscribe to the channel to be notified when we post that video.

Trust me, I'm always excited to be talking about taking notes.

Hopefully, you've gotten a chance to try out our free note-taking app, called RemNote, the first smart notes tool that applies science to your studies.

Check out this video over here for my top three favorite study strategies, and you can find the complete playlist right here.

And, if you wanna chat, just follow us on Twitter or Instagram and send us a message.

As always, thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.