Stop Studying. Start Learning | Justin Sung | TEDxUOA

Transcriber: Huyền Lê Phương Reviewer: Khaled Radwan I want to be a doctor. So when I was 17, I entered pre-med. It's famously competitive, so I studied a lot.

I had this routine wake up at seven for lectures study until 12 a. m. and then repeat every day.

One day I was sitting on the couch at uni and this guy from my class walks in and he says, I’m so tired. I studied until 2 a. m.

and I thought This guy studied more than me. So I went all out. I started studying 20 hours a day, every day for nine months.

I used to rub breath mints on my eyelids to keep me awake, which I do not recommend. So what was my result? Well, I got perfect grades and I got into medical school.

I saw a mental breakdown because it turns out that sleep is rather important. But the funny thing is that when I entered medical school. The content doubled.

So my strategy of studying 20 hours a day wasn’t going to cut it. And studying 40 hours a day seemed challenging and I wanted to enjoy my life too. So I had a problem.

My methods got me excellent results. But at what cost? I tackled this in the nerdiest way possible.

For the following several years, I read thousands of papers on learning. I adjusted my techniques daily and I taught what I learned to the students I was tutoring at the time too. So I saw how it worked for me and for my students.

I was so obsessed that I ended up going back to uni after finishing medical school to do my master’s in education. And I realized that this cycle of working hard and getting inconsistent results and then feeling anxious and then compensating by working even harder. This is common and avoidable.

Few years ago, I actually left my job as a medical doctor to teach these skills full time. Now I work with thousands of people from over 100 countries, teaching them to learn more efficiently. So here's what I know now that just changed the game.

Studying is not the same thing as learning. Studying is like reading a book or writing some notes, but you haven't learnt it until that knowledge is in your head and you can use it. And there's different levels too.

For example, regurgitating some facts is a lower level than a nuanced discussion or solving complex problems. Researchers sometimes talk about this as higher order versus lower order learning, and different types of studying can actually help to generate different orders of learning. Why does this matter?

Years ago, I didn’t know about this stuff and I thought I was pretty good at studying. After all, I got into medical school all that time and effort that I sunk in. It's just what you do, right?

You work hard. Not quite. Imagine you're driving along and your car breaks down.

If you’re like me, you pull over, pop the hood, take a look, and you think I don't know anything about cars. If you don't know how the engine works, you cannot fix it. Most people know that learning is a process.

But what goes on in that process, if we don't do well, do we know why and how to fix it? Or do we just guess and hope? Causes a lot of anxiety.

Did I study enough? Well, I hope this doesn’t come up in the test. Where did I go wrong?

When did I do well ? Who’s had those thoughts before? We end up living in fear of learning.

So step one is to learn how the engine works. Become the mechanic of your own brain. This thinking about thinking is called metacognition, and research shows that those with higher metacognition tend to do better.

And even if you're not doing that as straight away, you at least know how you can get better. The more you learn, the more control you have, the less stressed you get. This builds confidence.

On the other hand, if you have low metacognition, just do whatever someone tells you to do. This is probably the same thing that your friends are doing. The problem is that common methods create common results.

In my practice, I often see students overusing flashcards and space repetition. It's a common strategy on social media. In fact, in my pre-med year, I spent 4 hours a day every day to cover over 3000 flashcards.

But how efficient is it when we’re trying to juggle multiple subjects at the same time? And how effective is it when we need to reach a level to solve complex problems? Not a lot of research has looked at that.

And some of the latest research suggests that there are some significant limitations and the majority of people using these approaches are not getting top marks. But that’s all you know. Then taking that away is confronting.

That's how I felt. Some people would even get defensive, like, How dare you challenge my main technique? On the other side, I work with professionals that went through uni this way and they're struggling to learn efficiently while working full time.

They’re recertifying, they’re doing courses, they're going back to uni and they're dreading it. So we can avoid problems like this by learning about learning. One of the things that’s been consistently shown to help improve learning is something called higher order thinking skills.

Now this is hot, literally hot. And higher-order thinking is the type of thinking that’s needed to help generate this higher-order learning those different levels of learning I've been talking about. A characteristic feature of higher-order learning is that information is integrated, not isolated.

You're always connecting new information to a wider purpose or the bigger picture. You're looking for relationships and comparing information against other pieces of information. Low order learning is isolated.

It's about memorizing facts and definitions and processes. If you do, a lot of this, learning feels very tedious and irrelevant. Higher order learning connects information so that your brain sees it as relevant and therefore worth retaining.

If you like the same thing with low order learning, it's not very connected. So our brain doesn't think it's very relevant, so we forget it more easily. On top of that, learning has this snowball effect.

The more you know about something, the easier it is to learn more about it. Higher-order learning creates networks of knowledge, which is a stronger foundation for future learning. As you learn more, things make more sense and you become more efficient.

Unlike with low order learning, where as you learn more, your brain doesn’t know what to do with all the isolated new pieces of information and you just get more overwhelmed. Exams, especially at uni and beyond, test at higher orders, more and more. So how do we do?

More higher learning. Well, unfortunately, the research is quite complicated, and so there is no agreed on Step by step guide for higher learning. Thank you.

Goodbye. Just kidding. Fortunately this is one of the main things that I spent years experimenting with and teaching the skill is one of the core parts of the work that I do now.

So here is my step by step guide on higher order learning. Step one was to learn how the engine works, improve our metacognition. We can start this by tuning into the feeling of lower order versus high order learning.

I call this building a radar. You know that feeling you get when you’re reading something and you think, I am not going to remember this you know, you’re gonna have to go over it again and again and again. You can feel the information slipping out of your brain.

Who thought that before? Your brain is telling you this is irrelevant, it's isolated. So instead of just saying, Oh, well, smashing into I notes to deal with later and staying in that lower order.

Flick up into the higher order and make it relevant. So try this. Start a tally when you study and count how often you get this feeling.

Some of you will realize this is the only feeling you have when you study. The goal is to reduce this number by about 10% every time you study. How?

Step two. Group information together. Grouping information forces us to compare and look for relationships to see if it makes sense to group them together.

But it's not enough just to find relationships and make some groups. There are so many ways you could group information together. We need to think more deeply and prioritize the relationships so that we form the groups that make the most sense to us.

So ask yourself, how important is this relationship compared to another maybe similar relationship? What purpose does it serve? Often the groups that we will end up forming are different to how it’s presented to us in lectures or textbooks.

And this is normal because the way that we make sense of it is not always the same as the author or the lecturer. It takes real mental effort to not only find the relationships and the groups, but then to decide which relationships and groups are the most important for us. But that mental effort is the learning taking place, and that back and forth thinking is what higher order learning feels like.

Step one was to build that radar. Step two was to flick into those higher orders using groups and relationships. Step three is to leverage our notetaking.

Often the attitude we have towards writing notes is just on the page out of mind. We don’t really think about it. We just dump it in our note so we feel better.

Who does that? I used to spend hours every day studying my writing notes and learn nothing. Good notetaking should help our brain think, not help it avoid thinking.

So don’t write notes left to right sequentially down the page. I call this linear notetaking. The problem is that knowledge is not linear, so it's very difficult to express groups and relationships with linear notes.

So experiment with some nonlinear methods of notetaking. But even software and apps that can form maps and groups for us can make it too passive. We don’t want relationships and lines and arrows to appear at the press of a button.

We need to think about what groups we want to form, whether we want an arrowhead, even how thick we want to draw the arrow, if it's more or less important, because that's what higher order learning involves. It’s rather difficult to do this if someone is speaking to you like a lecture. So I actually recommend practicing with books when you’ve got time to stop and think.

I built a complete system using these methods as an end to end method of learning that I train to students as young as 12 years old, all the way through to people post-retirement in their seventies. And over the last two years, I've collected data on around 5000 of these students across 120 countries. And we found that those that use these methods are able to reach a level of learning and retention that would normally take them four weeks in just one or two weeks.

And the important thing is that this is a skill. A lot of people say I'm not smart enough or I'm just too old for this. After working with so many people, I can tell you that this is something that you can train.

And like any skill, it will come more naturally to some but training does make it easier. Around, now, usually, people will say, Well, Justin, it seems like this will takes a lot of time and effort that I already can’t afford. I can see some of you thinking that right now.

And you're right. Which is why most people don't do it. In fact, there’s something called the misinterpreted effort hypothesis that says that when we think something takes too much effort, we also see it as being ineffective.

So we stop doing it. But research, especially around learning, shows us that some of the most effective strategies require more effort. So avoiding it would be like going to the gym to work out.

But because the weights take effort to lift, we think that's not working and we go home. But what if it’s too hard? What if we don’t use high order thinking?

What then? Well, sure, you could cover your content faster. But only if we think about studying and not learning.

In reality, what I found is that we waste more time just re-learning the things that our brain saw as irrelevant and then forgot. It’s hard to see how big of a deal this is If we think about studying as just one session on a single afternoon. But across weeks of studying, that is a lot of waste of time.

It’s also very difficult to even reach higher orders of learning if we’re mostly thinking in the lower orders. So if we need to reach a high level and we don't have time to constantly just relearn things, then higher-order learning is actually more time efficient. So I’ll leave you with this.

Don’t be like me and just study more. We all only have 24 hours in the day. So would you rather use it to study or to learn?

Thank you.