12 ways to Active Recall in 12 minutes

- All right guys, active recall, the best way to learn backed by science. If you're not already on this, then I don't know what you're doing. Go subscribe to our channel or something or watch this, do something cause you're behind bro.

In a nutshell, active recall is basically quizzing yourself, it was my secret weapon. It was my super power all throughout medical school. And even now as a doctor, but anyway, I'm not here to waste your time.

I'm not trying to convince you. We're just going to cut straight through all the fluff. Here are 12 ways that you can use active recall step-by-step on a day-to-day basis to get better grades.

The first way to use active recall is to pretest. You can start using active recall before you even start learning, get a hold of some old papers or practice problems. It doesn't need to be a lot.

Just take a small quiz and don't worry. You're going to get many of these questions wrong and that's okay. And that's actually a good thing because you're trying to benefit from the hypercorrection effect.

This is when you thought that you knew an answer to something, but you ended up getting it wrong and it makes it more likely that you'll remember the right answer the next time you see it again, works like a charm, but many students skip the pretesting benefits. The next way to use active recall is to stop and recite. So we're still talking about using active recall before even going to class, stop and recite is extremely effective for learning new material the first time, if you're trying to get exposure to the material by either reading a textbook or watching educational videos on YouTube, then what you want to do is after every section you want to stop, close the book or pause the video and try to recite in your own words, what exactly you just learned?

And remember the more explicit you are, like writing it out or typing it out or saying it out loud, the better this method works. And you'll find that some topics are just too difficult for you to recite, so make a note of it. And then you can ask your professor during class or during office hours.

So those methods are great prior to going to class. This next way of using active recall can actually be done during class, and that is to write out questions. Here's some examples, you can turn each topic into a, what is question, like this slide is about addiction.

So what is the definition of addiction? That's the question right there. You can turn each process into a how question, how is ATP made?

You can turn each concept into a why question. Why is this so complicated? You can also look at the lecture objectives or review questions for that chapter.

Those are free questions that the professor wrote for you. So don't sleep on those. There are so many perks to this method of active recall, writing questions is kind of like reverse active recall.

Like when the professor is talking about a topic you want to think, how could this be asked on the test? Another perk is that writing questions keeps you engaged so that you don't fall asleep during class. But the main perk is that you'll have questions to practice recall later on.

And by later on, I mean immediately after class, that brings us to number four, immediate review. So after class, I usually go straight to the library or go straight to the coffee shop. And since you've already written your questions during class now is the best time to quickly run through them.

And it doesn't need to take that long. And actually it shouldn't take that long because you're not peeking at your lecture, you're not peeking at your notes. All you're doing is just trying to recall straight from your memory, okay, and that's it.

So like 15, 20 minutes, you want to go at it actively. You want to try to physically write out or type out the answers as best as you can remember. Let's say that you fell asleep during lecture.

It happens. Or let's say you were too lazy to write questions. Another way that you can do immediate review is by just going through the lecture slides one by one and try to explain or teach out the concept that was on the slide.

So now we are in the timeframe after going to class and it's been at least a day, if not more, since you've gone to class. So your goal now is to make sure that you understand all the topics. One of the best ways to use active recall here is by using the toggles within a note taking app.

So to demonstrate this, I'm going to be using REMNote. It's an app that we built for students from our own personal experiences in university and medical school. It's free to use, feel free to open it and follow along.

Basically, you can see that when studying for an exam, you have all the topics that will be tested all nicely packed in one place. And I have nested under each chapter, all the topics, processes, and concepts that I need to know. And I can just go through, test myself on these questions and then check my answers as I go.

I like to use toggles on a note taking app at this stage of learning because I can see how all the details fits into the bigger context of the exam as a whole. And obviously when you take the test, the questions will come at you at random. For now, you can make sure you understand all the concepts and how all the pieces fit together before you start mixing it up.

The next way to use active recall is using mind maps. This can really be used at any stage of your study schedule, but I find it helpful for me after I have a good understanding of the bigger picture. It's fairly simple to do.

You grab a blank piece of paper. You pick a topic that you want to study and you proceed to brain dump everything you know about that topic. But the important thing to remember here is that you can't just throw ideas willy nilly onto the page.

You have to link the idea to something that's already on the page. So not only are you recalling specific concepts, but you're also recalling how they relate to each other. This next way to use active recall is great for study groups, so call your friends, get together.

What you're going to do is teach each other. If you don't have any friends, then you can round up the gang, and you can go ahead and teach them. Some people call this the Feynman Technique.

Some people call this the Protege Effect. It doesn't really matter. The one thing that does matter is that you have to teach from memory, you can't peek at your notes.

If you don't want to talk out loud, that's fine. You can still get by doing something active, like writing it out or typing out specifically what you want to say in a script format. Because this forces you to really pick your words carefully.

The beauty of this method is that you can apply different types of constraints, for example, you can pretend that you're teaching a seven-year-old, which means you have to use the most basic words possible. Or you can pretend to teach someone who isn't in your class or even outside of your field. And this means that you can't use jargon or you can't use key terms that they don't understand, or you can pretend to teach someone who's very nosy and this person will keep asking you why, why is this?

Why is that? Every time you explain something, they'll just ask you why. And you just keep answering until you've broken down your concepts into its most fundamental parts.

This next phase of learning is when I feel like I understand the big concepts and how everything works, now comes the part where I have to start memorizing all the little details. So the next way to use active recall is my personal favorite way, and that is flashcards, specifically digital flashcards. If you know me, then you already know this, digital flashcards are mobile, they save time, they randomize your practice and they employ spaced repetition.

Obviously I'm biased here, but REMNote is again, my favorite tool for flashcards. There are just a lot of little time-saving nuances built into the software, I'm not going to cover them here. But what I will say is that we have an entire video dedicated to how you can make better flashcards and you can find it right here.

A lot of students love studying flashcards because you can find pre-made decks from other students online. I'm guilty of this myself. I remember downloading most of my medical decks from the top students.

The next way to use active recall is enumeration. This method is particularly useful for process and problem-based classes like math, because the way it works is that you have to recall the answers in a specific order. So whether it's the steps of a process or a list of a series recall in the same order every time, and by the way, notice how you can come up with your own mnemonics to help you with your enumeration?

The next method for active recall is occlusion. And this method is particularly useful for recalling images, structures, graphs, charts, and that sort of stuff. I personally use occlusion a lot when studying anatomy and surgery, because there were a lot of images to remember.

REMNote Pro has a version where you can incorporate occlusion images with your flashcards. But you can also achieve this simply on a word document If you wanted to, just drag a box over the pictures, you can delete it to reveal the answer, and then you can undo delete to put it back. Occlusion isn't just limited to images, by the way, you can also include certain words from a sentence or a paragraph, kind of like fill in the blank type of question.

This is called closed deletion. If you want to get fancy with terms, but it's really useful if you don't have a lot of time to make flashcards or mind maps, you just cover it up and go crazy. Okay guys, now we're in the home stretch.

We've learned the info. We've understood it. And we've started memorizing details.

I would start doing practice questions as soon as possible. This is particularly important with math or problem-based subjects, but also very important for medicine and actually every other subject really, when you find practice problems, make sure that they come with answers and explanations to those answers. The key learning point here is that you want to understand why the wrong answers are wrong and why the right answers are right, for a multiple choice question with four answer choices, A, B, C, and D.

You can potentially make four different flashcards from that one question to review later, if you're preparing for an essay or humanities test, then try finding last year's writing prompts. So you want to prepare your essay blueprints ahead of time and afterward your blueprints can be turned into flashcards that you can then commit to memory. That way, on the day of the test, you already have your essay blueprints memorized, and you don't have to waste any time thinking about what you need to write.

And the last and necessary way to practice active recall is by doing practice tests, taking a practice test is mandatory if you're studying for a standardized test. So when I'm talking about taking practice tests, the difference here compared to just doing practice problems is that you're trying to mimic your actual test conditions as much as possible. So you'll want to time yourself.

You will want to only take as many bathroom breaks as you're allowed to, you want to wear what you intend to wear. Ear plugs, your lucky sweater, a face mask. The most important thing you want to get out of the practice test is to gauge which topics are your strengths and which are your weaknesses.

So that in the final days leading up to your tests, you can really focus your active recall practice on the topics that need improvement. So that was 12 different ways to use active recall. And I know that you're all just dying to go out there and start using these methods.

In the meantime, don't forget to check out our video on different ways to use spaced repetition. The second best science-based study strategy. You can find it right here.