Studying My Masters in 1/6th of the Time

so i'm starting my masters of education soon and um i get a lot of comments saying like hey you can't use this technique for you know whatever you can't use it to study there so it doesn't work for me or doesn't work for that or whatever you know people have a lot of a lot of opinions about the techniques um especially when it comes to the kind of mind mapping thing you know the video that went semi-viral so i thought it'd be a rare demonstration for me to actually go through and show how it's not

about a single technique it's actually about how this the technique is part of a wider system and it facilitates other parts of the system like you can have the best rims on a car you get the best engine but if the what okay look i don't know much about cars but if the other parts of the car are not also good then you're gonna be held back so there's this concept of a rate limiting step in science and it's a really common uh common idea and you know the way that was first taught to me

was uh in biology class right it's the idea that you can basically have like if you imagine like a barrel and this barrier this barrel is made up of like wooden planks but let's say that one of these wooden planks is only up to halfway okay and the rest of this is just blank how high can you fill it with water well you can only fill it you know this high with water because all the water is obviously going to leak out the shortest plank is and that's the rate limiting step right so if the

rate limiting step is let's say the fact that you are relying purely on active recall and space repetition for which there is this like strange level of obsession and hype about despite the fact it can actually make it even worse because it can become so unsustainable for example having like 4 000 different flash cards that they're doing they can be spending so much time on justice-based repetition and retrieval rehearsal that they're actually not spending as much time on the encoding aspect of the information which we know is important so that there is actually useful stuff

to retrieve so um you know in my experience people that are relying only on a system of active recall and space repetition are not really going to find much success and actually as you get later and later on throughout uh academic careers especially um you know later university uh for like maybe like fourth year fifth year or you know working as a professional your learning is very marginally using something like active recording space repetition most of your learning will never really happen that way yes if you're not doing it at all and you know you've

got nothing in in place that has to do with active recall and space repetition then yes you are gonna find it advantageous uh but what i'm saying is that that's not where it ends that's kind of where it begins you have to also have on top of that the other side of the coin not just the thing that you're retrieving but actually being able to uh encode the information uh at a higher level of quality to begin with and obviously i've got a lot of other videos uh that will talk about this and it's an

important concept so i will continue to make videos about this anyway i want to show you how i'm gonna study for my master's assign tomorrow um it's a you know reasonably you know intense um sort of course and i'm trying to do quite well for it so we'll be doing some pre-study and i'll go through how uh the way that i learn fits into a wider system and it'll be one of the many examples that i give that shows that this does work it works for pretty much everything it works for english maths biology chemistry

physics medicine ecology accounting pretty much everything it works for us it's the way that the brain works so unless you don't have a brain it's going to work for you so the first thing that is always important to do when starting studying is to figure out how am i going to be retrieving this information and how do i therefore organize it in my brain as soon as the information goes on it's kind of like organizing your room it's easier to make sure that everything is put in the right place when it goes into your room

rather than throwing everything in your room seeing that it's a mess then trying to organize it afterwards if you do even organize it at all not even trying to encode it properly would be like having a messy room and then just trying to find whatever it is and then finding it again so many times that you just memorized exactly where in the room it was it actually makes more sense to put it somewhere that's logical so that it's easier to remember where it is and then your brain can use that more effectively you can see

how why uh improper encoding combined with just lots of active record space repetition would therefore cause a very repetitive tedious and unnecessarily time-consuming learning process so i've had a look through the assessment criteria and i've had to look at the way that i'm going to be assessed so i generally understand how i'm going to need to use this knowledge and right now i'm learning about autism spectrum disorder um so i'm going to be reading this article about autism spectrum disorder so you can see it's a pretty decent sized article and that's actually one of like

seven that i'm going to be reading and i will try to read them all in one go uh so because it's such a large amount of information in order for me to process that correctly i need to be very clear about the mental schema in which i'm going to arrange everything so if you think about again like a room or a warehouse you're trying to organize having lots of different shelves with lots of different organization is going to make a lot of sense because it means that i can categorize it more effectively if i've got

a shelf and it says all of that stuff has to do with let's say the diagnosis then that's going to make sense for me to think about it in terms of that shuffle stuff to do with diagnosis but then if that shelf is not organized then it's still hard to find stuff on the shelf i may know that it's in that shelf but it's still going to be difficult to find likewise even if i know that this information belongs cognitively organized in a group called diagnosis it's still going to be difficult for me to retrieve

that because there is still too much stuff in a single shelf so i actually look at what level of each you know of that entire bookcase or whatever am i going to assign for each thing and i'm not talking about a physical vision of a bookcase or anything i'm using this as purely a metaphor an analogy so um not only do i want to figure out the big chunks but i also want to figure out the sub chunks and how those subjects relate to each other so for example you wouldn't put your kitchen towels next

to your socks or your shoes you know it doesn't really make sense because it's not a logical place to put them so i wouldn't really put a piece of concept that i learned in the first page that might relate to the treatment i wouldn't necessarily put that on the first chunk that i have which might actually be about diagnosis because that that doesn't make sense you know the treatment actually comes later so um right now as i'm reading i'm just going to be thinking about creating this mental schema i'm thinking why are these pieces of

information important how can they relate to each other what are the chunks i can create and how can i make that as organized as possible once i have a good understanding of the scope of what i'm learning and how it can potentially fit and fit together i have a basic backbone i'll represent that in my mind map and then i'll take that information and then i'll build on it so it's a multi-layered approach again if this is a little bit overwhelming then don't worry i do go this through this step by step from beginning to

end every single process every single detail in the course so again if you're interested you can check that out so at this stage i have a basic uh outline of how it looks and you can see that it's very simple um it's it's very bare bone but on the skeleton i'm then going to build all the other information on top of it so it'll allow it to be organized a bit more so as i add more detail i'm constantly trying to find a way to organize it and simplify it and create further relationships so you'll

see that this adapts and changes and grows as it goes and the larger the topic that you're doing at a single go the more complicated it becomes and the longer it takes to simplify but as it becomes simpler and simpler and simpler the learning speed increases uh exponentially well i don't know if it's exponential but it gets faster and faster and faster uh because you're kind of just building on the same thing and the foundation starts getting so strong that actually all the subsequent details and concepts become much easier to understand much easier to process

because your organizational structure is not really changing so much anymore and then you're able to really just process and learn it and it just makes a lot more sense so right now you can i can definitely tell you you know i've just been reading through like you know not very in detail at all but just by framing this it feels overwhelming there's so much information there's a sense of discomfort here but cognitive load theory tells us that actually maintaining that discomfort is going to be good for us in our learning that's going to fuel us

to learn this a little bit more quickly so i'm used to this discomfort it's not scaring me at all the confusion is good it's fuel for growth so i'm going to work through this confusion i'm going to figure it out i'm going to add more details and we'll see where it gets to once i've added on more details once i go through this extremely long article [Music] so it is uh it's been four and a half hours actually since i last uh recorded and uh let me show you what i've got at the moment so

yeah as you can see there's you know quite a bit of chunking and relationships that have been formed between the ideas these notes have been taken from 50 pages of a textbook about 40 something pages of a best practice guideline uh 11 12 pages from research article and i'm in the final stage now where there are four more articles to review about 12 pages in total and i'll be consolidating them onto this so uh in total in the last well and what will eventually become maybe around five or five and a half hours uh i

will have gone through around 90 pages of quite academic uh reading i mean you can have a look at the type of stuff that this is um and i feel like i've got very really good retention on it i had some um specific questions that i was thinking of when i was going through this and so this whole process i was doing was a combination of those of you going through our course this is a lot of order control a lot of um syntopical reading which is where you read multiple sources of information talking about

the same topic simultaneously it allows you to build a more robust foundation in a faster way because you're not locked into learning it linearly a big part of it came from really being able to create that clear structure and organization and being able to organize as i went so the first um you know i've been studying for four and a half hours the first uh 40 pages of the textbook took me a long time a long time it took me like three hours just to do that but then after that the remaining 40 pages of

this other article took me only about one hour in total um so it's getting faster and now uh then the article after that was very quick just minutes because i wasn't really learning anything new however every time i was reading it i was sort of consolidating and thinking of more ideas so that's because of the fact the organization once it's stabilized doesn't tend to change much and as i mentioned before the process became faster and faster so now i'm on the other side of the fence really and it feels much more comfortable the knowledge feels

very comfortable i feel very uh i feel very confident working with what i've got i definitely know that there are gaps in my knowledge and these are the things that i will take to my tutorial i'll ask someone that's more experienced and knowledgeable than me about this and i'm just in the final section here now uh i thought this would be a good opportunity to to just outline the technique that i'm going to be using right now in terms of just more active chunking so i have here 24 different points and for me i need

to understand what each of these 24 points is talking about so it's talking about important things to consider when starting an intervention for a child diagnosed with autism so there are 24 important points and i know that there is going to be a link between some of these points there will be similarities between these points for me i'm going to go through a process of chunking i'm going to collect all of these points and then i'm going to look through to see if i can find meaningful chunks between them and i'll go through that process

and show you how i can turn those 24 points into something that is a lot more manageable rather than trying to just memorize 24 things which most students would just chuck onto a flash card and that's it's done not organized sitting on a pile on the floor of your of your memory very hard to retrieve uh likely to be forgotten not really being encoded into your long-term memory uh and obviously that's going to be a waste of time constantly repeating this and i really don't want to have to repeat this process very often i want

to learn it and then i want to be able to apply it i want to be able to use it and have a high level of competence straight off the bat so let's uh let's go through this process a little bit it turns out there's actually only 12 things uh not 24 which makes my job easier but the demonstration is slightly more lame uh but i basically i just use a notepad and i just noted down all the um key things that they were talking about and the important thing here is that when i was

reading this i wasn't just reading in order to like make a list i was deliberately reading in a way that made me organize information to think how can i make it into groups and how can i chunk it so when you read with a with a clear purpose that is evaluating an idea and comparing it against similar ideas and looking for similarities and differences and thinking of different ways that they could fit together uh and be grouped um it's a different way of thinking it's what's called higher order learning and it's a more effective form

of learning it increases your encoding increases your retention increases your processing speed it makes learning more interactive and more engaging and fun it is a little bit more cognitively difficult but it's cognitively difficult in the way that lying on the couch doing absolutely nothing is not difficult but it's also not particularly enjoyable or much of anything whereas you know doing something that is enjoyable might take effort like playing a game might take effort but it's not that the effort is a bad thing so it's the same thing as that we're trying to produce good learning

uh and so actually doing it this way is is a better uh use of that time if we're gonna be spending the time anyway we may as well learn properly and not just learn passively students that are very young you know they really struggle with this but when you're kind of nearing the end of high school uh last two three years of high school you really need to start developing this ability to take ownership of the learning uh take control of it and be the one that organizes the information yourself not have someone else do

it for you because as an independent learner in university no one's going to do that for you you have to learn that's that skill at sink or swim and and it's better to learn to swim in the kiddie pool aka high school rather than learn to swim when maybe your university grades matter a little bit more on my list of 12 things how is it related to the other items on that list and why is this fundamentally something important for me and how am i going to use this how am i going to use this

information so if i think about that you know i let the brain whirr for a bit and then we'll see what we get to in terms of this order and we will see if we can make this make a little bit more sense intuitively and there we go uh so it's been broken down into one two three bigger groups and chunks so i i looked at it and i thought why is this important for me to know and i thought okay so we've got three main reasons of importance uh and then within the third one

the second one there are three sub reasons for importance you'll notice that when you do this you'll find that actually the retention and the understanding and the depth of understanding from the you know all the concepts that you do this activity for will be much greater than if you just read it purely to try to understand it or memorize it or recall it so when your brain is reading or learning something for the for the specific purpose of trying to evaluate it and chunk it and group it and it does that what's called higher order

learning it will automatically allow you to understand and memorize it faster than if you would actually deliberately try to just directly memorize it and understand it which means that to try to to try to to memorize and understand something in the fastest possible way you actually need to not try to memorize and understand it which is counterintuitive i understand but this is how your brain works so you you activate higher order learning and it fills in all the gaps on the way kind of automatically and so if you try this you will find that it's

actually a an engaging and unique way of thinking that most students aren't really used to high level learners will already do this automatically and if you are already doing this that's good for you uh but try to use it even more uh more actively even at a deeper level so once you're aware of it if you've already got the basic skill down automatically which a lot of high-level learners already do then then use it to another level you know really create a system out of it so that's one of the things about the system that

i've created that's in the course again link below if you care uh is that it takes the way that your brain works and then it fundamentally fundamentally creates the system around how the brain works and then we can supplement it with other things like memorization aids and flashcard techniques and all that sort of stuff but you know we really want to get our basic cognitive process first otherwise we're constantly just fighting an uphill battle so let's just take all of that stuff that was on the computer and we will just chuck that onto the mind

map and here we go so i've added on this little blue part in there to the original mind map so it was just like this before and now it has this part added so this is the representation of that and uh you can see that that is a lot i mean less pleasant to look at and harder to process than this now it's going to be easier for me to process because i'm the one that thought about how to draw it so it makes sense to me so even if it doesn't make sense to you

trust that it is effective for me and if you were to do a similar process it would be effective for you too and that concludes my study session it did go a little longer than i expected um just under five hours but i did cover around about what like 90 pages worth of pretty intensive reading and i'm quite happy with where i'm at um and i will likely look at this again sometime in the next few days just to refresh myself because once the encoding is done the next step is everyone's favorite active recall and

space repetition but now i don't need to do so much space repetition and it's not going to take up too much time because it's naturally already encoded pretty well all i need to do is remind myself where all the different boxes sit on the different shelves and the rest is kind of sort of automatic and it really honestly it makes it a lot easier so a bit of a demonstration um on the the system now if there were additional things that i wanted to memorize i don't need to retrieve this knowledge in terms of pure

factory core so i don't need to really put any of this stuff onto flashcards but if i did need to then i would simultaneously at this point have put things into flash cards but uh even if i did need to retrieve through pure factory record there's probably only about 10 15 flash cards i'd have for this whole topic um hopefully you were able to use this as an insight into how the process kind of works once it is refined i don't expect you to take this video and suddenly know how to do all the techniques

but i do want you to be able to look at this and think okay so once i develop the techniques this is how it can be used and i want to be there as proof that it does actually work and it is completely all in the techniques it's not like my brain is anything special i just use techniques that i've practiced thousands of times and my students naturally are able to achieve you know pretty good results from using the same process as well so hopefully you liked that if you did if you found this useful

please leave a like if you have any comments as usual leave them down below if you've got any questions about how the technique can be applied um if you're interested to learn more about the theories and the techniques and all of that sort of stuff then check out my other videos i will plan to put out as many as possible uh covering different aspects of the system and different ways of doing things like mind maps and improving your memory and reducing repetition and uh using different parts of your brain more effectively and things like that

so stay tuned if you want to hear more about that sort of stuff make sure that you subscribe but otherwise i'll see in the next one [Music] you