How to Study Effectively with Flash Cards – College Info Geek
This is a flashcard.
More specifically,it's a bad flashcard.
And by the end of this video,you're gonna understand exactly why becausetoday, we're talking about how to make effective flashcards and how to study themmore efficiently.
Now, flashcards arean incredibly powerful learning tool because theypromote active recall, the process of activelyretrieving memories out of your brain, which isone of the most efficient learning strategies there are.
But flashcards are toolsmade by human beings and as you probably know,things made by humans come in varyingdegrees of quality.
For example, my girlfriend'sart versus my art.
However, when we go intothe making of a thing with the best practices in mind, we can come out with abetter product and in today's video, I'mgonna give you eight specific rules for bothmaking better flashcards and for studying themmore effectively.
Now, for the purposesof this video, I figured I would needsome flashcards of my own to use as examples.
So I've gone ahead andissued myself a challenge and that is to learnand memorize the entire periodic table ofelements because believe it or not, Iactually never took chemistry in high school.
I had a really busy schedulewith other classes at the time and just never got toit, so I've gone ahead and started makingsome flashcards, which I will be using inthe course of this challenge and we're gonna usethese to demonstrate the elements of good flashcards.
But first, we have to startwith a more general tip, which is to simply makeyour own flashcards.
I know a lot of people liketo share their flashcards with their friendsand for people who study flashcards oncomputers or on apps, there are entire onlinecommunities where you can upload and download pre-madedecks and I think these have their usesin certain cases, but in most cases, it'sgonna be much more effective for you to makeyour own flashcards.
One of the most integraland important parts of learning is the processof intaking information and really wranglingwith it on your own and creating your ownwords and your own forms out of that information.
That's gonna build reallystrong neural pathways and those are gonna be uniquefrom the neural pathways of somebody else and if youjust take pre-made cards made by somebody elsethat you didn't have to do any work to create,you're denying yourself that entire part oflearning process.
So, now that you knowthe importance of making your cards yourself,let's get into the actual nitty gritty of whatmakes a card good and the first tip I've gotfor you is to add pictures to your cards and tomix them up with words.
Now, in cognitive psychology,there's a principle called the picturesuperiority effect, which describes howpeople remember images and pictures much betterthan they do words and from an evolutionarystandpoint, this makes sense.
Written languageis just a system of arbitrary symbolsthat people made up and when we look atthings on a grand scale, it really hasn't beenaround for all that long.
Plus, our brains areadapted to be very sensitive to imagery.
The locations of food,the animals that'll think you're food, the animalsthat won't think you're food but they'll still completelymess you up, et cetera.
By adding picturesto your flashcards, you can make them alot more memorable and personally, I liketo do this by drawing on my flashcards, but youcan also just print out pictures from theinternet and glue them on or if you're using an appor a computerized flashcard program, a lot of themwill allow you to easily import pictures.
But you can takethis one step further by making sure thosepictures are next to words.
In 1985, there was astudy done in Canada that showed thatdescriptive sentences added next to pictures madethose pictures much easier for people to recall.
Now, if you take a look atmy chemistry flashcards here, you might think theylook a little bit weird.
But that's actually onpurpose because they're demonstrating the thirdtip I've got for you, which is to use mnemonicdevices on your flashcards.
Now, a mnemonic deviceis really anything that helps you createassociations between pieces of informationin your mind.
The classic one isthe acronym, ROYGBIV, which helps you rememberthe order of the colors in the visible lightspectrum, but it can really be anything and I'musing associative imagery on my flashcards.
For example, myflashcard for magnesium as a magnemite asking formore goulash, which is a completely ridiculouspicture but, it helps me remember theassociation between Mg and magnesium becausemagnemite sounds like Magnesium and more goulash is agood way to remember Mg.
Now, the more weird and crazyand wacky these pictures are, the more easily you'regoing to remember them and remember, you'remaking your flashcards for yourself, so it doesn'tmatter what anyone else thinks of them or whetheror not those associations would work for someone else.
It's just for you.
So, the next few tipsI've got for you guys really go hand in hand.
The first one is to haveonly one question or fact one each one of your flashcards.
Now, doing this isgonna help you avoid what are calledIllusions of Competence.
Basically, our brainscan really easily confuse recognition with recall.
When you recognizesomething, you're basically affirming to yourselfthat yes, I've seen this or I've been exposedto it before.
But recall is different.
Recall is actively retrievingsomething out of memory without again,being exposed to it.
And our brains can reallyconfuse these things if we're not careful.
So, here's an example.
Say you're taking ahistory of flight class because obviously,airplanes are awesome and now you'restudying for a test where you need toknow some information about the first airplane,the Wright flyer.
So, you makeyourself a flashcard.
You put FirstAirplane on the front, but then on the back, youput several different facts and here's where youcan run into trouble because later on, whenyou're studying and you see First Airplane, you mightremember that it flew in 1903.
You might remember that itwas called the Wright flyer and you might even rememberthat it flew four times.
But maybe you forgot that itused a sprocket chain drive to drive the propellers.
And then you turn it overand you say to yourself, "Oh yeah, I do remember that.
" And then you put it aside.
So, by making fourindividual cards for each of these facts,you're guaranteeing that you're getting eachone either right or wrong and that's gonna helpyou to study the ones you got wrong moreefficiently and avoid those illusions of competence.
Now, on a related note, wehave the fifth tip here, which is to break complexconcepts or questions down into simpler questions.
And you can run into a lotof situations like this one, where let's sayyou're trying to learn the differentgroupings of elements on the periodic table.
And there's lots of them.
There's the alkali metals,the transition metals, there's some noble gases.
So, maybe you go and makea flashcard like this where all these groupingsare a different color and you have toname all of them.
Well, once again, thisis a bad flash card because maybe you knowsome of those groupings.
Maybe you know all butone, but that one grouping you didn't know, there'sgonna be an illusion of competence and you'regonna think that you knew it just by looking at thelisting on the back.
So instead, makeflashcards like this that only highlightone of those groupings and make sure that youknow it before putting that flashcard aside.
So, now that you guys knowsome of the best practices for making your flashcards,it's now time to move over into how to study them.
I've got threereally important tips in this section ofthe video for you guys starting with thefirst one, which is to say your answers out loud when you're studyingyour flashcards.
This is kinda just away to mentally commit to your answer beforeyou actually look at the back of thecard, which helps you, again, avoid thoseillusions of competence and helps you make surethat you're not recognizing the answer and mistakingthat recognition for recall.
Make sure that youactually know the answer.
Now, the second tip hereis to make sure you study your cards from bothsides and this is a way of creating neural pathwaysin your brain that work in bothdirections so that way, if you're asked eitherside of a question, you'll be able to tracethat neural pathway back to the answer.
For example, if you onlystudied the chemical symbol, Be and you knew thatit stood for Beryllium, but then you werelater on asked, "What's the chemicalsymbol for Beryllium," you might not be able toget back to Be if you didn't study the cards inboth directions.
So, make sure you do.
And lastly guys, myfinal tip for you here is to realize that flashcardsare not a silver bullet.
They're just one methodof reviewing material and they are situational.
They're just like, say,a bow and arrow, right? You wouldn't use abow and arrow in every single situation.
You wouldn't use itup-close no matter how good of a Hanzo playeryou think you are and flashcards arethe exact same way.
You have to know the rightsituations to use them in.
A lot of informationties into an overall visual hierarchy oran organization andwith flashcards, you kind of lose that.
For instance, the periodictable is a really, really powerful visual tooland if you were to say, try to memorize all theatomic numbers of the elements with flashcards, you'dreally be doing your brain a disservice becauselearning the periodic table and all the visualrepresentations and relationships ismuch more effective.
Also, make sure thatyou're learning before you're reviewingbecause flashcards often aren't the best toolfor teaching you the underlying concepts,which may help you learn facts much more efficiently.
So, those are my eighttips for improving the way that you make andstudy flashcards and right now, you mightbe thinking to yourself, "Wait a minute, Tomskipped something.
" And yes, I did, becausethere's one additional incredibly effectivetechnique for learning and studying that goes handin hand with flashcards and that is spaced repetition.
But that's such a complextopic and I really wanna dig deep into it and teachyou guys the science behind it and how to use iteffectively both on paper and with apps, sothat is gonna be the subject ofnext week's video.
Until then guys, thankyou so much for watching and if you've got additionaltips about flashcards, I would love to hear themdown in the comments below.
Also, if you enjoyed thisvideo and you found it helpful, give it a like tosupport this channel and if you wanna get newvideos on being a more effective studentevery single week, you can click that bigred Subscribe button right down there.
If you wanna get a freecopy of my book on earning better grades, youcan click the picture of the book rightthere and if you missed last week's video,it was on having a more productive summer, socheck it out right there.
You can find the fullarticle for this video with lots of links andresources and cool extra details right over there and ifyou wanna connect with me, go out into the forestand tune into one of those creepy number stationsand listen for my voice.
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