How To Study Anything Part 1

How to Study Anything

This is something that I’ve thought about off and on, and I’ve actually taught this to students who were preparing for the PTCB examination, and so I want to call this How to Study Anything.  Please know that what I share here can be applied to practically any course of study.

See many times we have a course of materials that is lengthy, that may have a lot of moving parts, and initially we may feel that it’s difficult to assemble everything and to have everything together that we need to know. Honestly, the first time that I actually employed many of the things that I teach, I actually had left school already and I learned how I could have gotten better grades, and I could have really done better than I did if I had some tools under my belt. So I’ve studied a lot of different things, pharmacy being one of them; I’ve taken a lot of different courses, and I was able to implement many of the things that I’m going to share with you after I went to pharmacy school. 

Whenever you have to study something, it’s important to break it down into short segments because you really cannot study something for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Your brain will remember the first thing that you studied and it will remember the last thing that you studied in detail, so if you can break your study time up into short fifteen minute segments, even though you say that you are going to study for two hours, or you’re going to study for an hour, you want to break those up into quarter hour segments and in between your studying you want to do something that doesn’t have anything to do with that material to kind of give your brain a chance to debrief. So I’m saying like a five minute task that doesn’t have anything really to do with studying in between.  When you go back into your study mode, one of the things that you want to do is you want to be able to recall those things that you have studied already. 

You’re going to have to actually write yourself questions. The study period that follows your initial studies, you should be writing down questions for you to answer either during that period or during a later time to reinforce what you’ve learned already. If you can do this, it’ll make studying easier. It’ll make it an easier task for you and you will retain more.

 Another thing that works is have a buddy, and this particular buddy is someone that doesn’t understand this course material. I remember when I was in school, one of the things that I used to do was sit my younger brother down and I used to talk to him about the things that I was studying. I would give him my notes and have him ask me questions, and that’s the way that I was able to get through school.

It’s important that the person that you study with, or the person that is your buddy, that they don’t really know anything about the material so that you have to explain it to them and make them understand it.

The next thing has to do with books, and specifically textbooks. Many of your textbooks have learning objectives, and you know, the learning objectives if they’re in your book, they actually will be maybe the first page of the chapter and it will be a sidebar usually or it’ll be bullet points, and it’ll just go through the things that you need to master before you can say that you have read the chapter.

Now, one thing that I figured out is that most people when they go to read chapters for retention, they do it incorrectly. And me being guilty of this before, if I knew back then what I know now about studying, I would have done things much more differently. The learning objectives are there because this comes directly from the author; this is what the author is saying “this is my work that I have done and I’m sharing it with you, and this is what I want you to get out of it”.

Learning objectives are very, very important. When it comes to developing learning objectives, which I have done for many of the classes that I have taught, there’s a syllabus that’s associated with the class, and any good syllabus has a section of learning objectives and usually the barometer is with seventy percent accuracy, so you need to master these things with seventy percent accuracy. There are some things where I will go even higher on that percentage because I feel that it’s just that important, and because of the core of study that I teach it’s really important that people master things like mathematics in the ninety-five to one hundred percent category because we have people’s lives that we’re dealing with. Usually in other courses that are not life dependent so to speak, the barometer is usually seventy percent, sometimes eighty percent with eighty percent accuracy, meaning that you need to master those things. If you’ve got ten questions on that particular subject matter, you should be able to answer eight of them correctly ifits eighty percent, and seven of them correctly if its seventy percent.

Getting back to chapter material, the learning objectives are very important because they come directly from the author and this is what they want you to know; this is the reason for them writing this chapter, for you to learn these things. Now it’s important that you take those learning objectives, and you develop questions from those learning objectives. If the learning objective is to describe the five different ways to clean a room let’s say…I’m making this up…and so what you would want to do from that is you want to put it in the form of a question and say “what are the five different ways or methods of cleaning a room?” With each different method, what you’re going to do is you’re going to be able to describe each method. Each method is going to have its own set of information. 

Now what I like to use (contact me to request this) is something that I call it Walker’s Mind Map, and what I do is I put the central theme in that center circle, and everything else that’s attached to that circle is something that’s attached to that main thought. I use a microscope philosophy, and what I mean is this: you have your course adjustment, you have your fine adjustment. So I take this with information, I say you want to get the big picture; you want to be able to use that course adjustment, if you will, to get the big picture…the big scope of what it is that you’re to learn. But at any given time, you can use that fine adjustment to get a crisper image. So what I’m saying to you is if you break up your course material into different segments, you should be able to go and see the whole entire picture, and at the same time you should be able to focus in on any element and be able to define and describe that element in detail. It’s only when you can do this, that you can say that you’ve mastered that particular course of study.

So, getting back to the chapter work, when you have ascertained what those learning objectives are, you’ve developed your questions- these are the questions that you should be able to answer after you’ve gone through the whole entire process.

The next thing that you want to do is you want to look for a chapter summary. Now many books have what’s called a chapter summary and it’s at the end of the chapter. The chapter summary will actually put in bullet points (it’s usually in bullet points), they will put topic sentences and these are the things in small nuggets that you need to master in order to really have delved into that chapter. So learning objectives first, then what you want to do is you want to go through the chapter summary. Now, it’s only when you’ve done these two things that you can go back and start to read the course material that’s in the chapter. And once again, most people don’t do it right.

You have figures, you have charts, you have diagrams, if your chapter contains any of these things you need to look at those things first. So any figures, any charts, any lists- anything that breaks away from the prose, the reading of that actual chapter- you want to look at those things first because how many times…let’s be honest!...how many times have you been reading a chapter, and you start from the beginning of the chapter, and you go to the end of the chapter and you get interrupted? It’ll say ‘see figure one’, and its right smack in the middle of a sentence. Wouldn’t it be better if you’ve already looked at figure one before you  actually start the reading of the chapter? I think that makes sense. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to look at any figures, any charts, any diagrams, any lists, and any maps- you’re to look at those before you actually start reading the chapter.

Once you have done all of that, the next thing that you’re going to do is you’re going to look at the chapter headings. Chapter headings are very important because what you can do from the chapter headings is you can develop an outline, and this outline will basically be an outline of the chapter. You know that your author, or your publisher- the publisher of your textbook- probably has these chapter headings in different fonts. So you’ll have a very bold font that is the main idea, and then you’ll have all these other fonts that come underneath the main idea. You may have a smaller font that is bold that is a subset of the very main idea, and then you may have a lighter font, or maybe a lighter font with underlining or maybe a different color font, that would be a subset of the subset of the main idea. If you can outline the chapter, and you can put all of the main ideas together, you’ll get a big picture of what that particular chapter is trying to teach you. You’ll be able to develop an outline of the chapter and you’ll understand ‘okay, well this particular thing comes under this particular heading’. That’s one thing that’s really, really integral to understanding your chapter work.

Now let’s say that your particular book doesn’t  do this- there’s no learning objectives, there’s no chapter summary, there’s no diagrams- it’s all reading. Well if you have this type of chapter layout, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to have to develop those things.  You’re going to have to read through the material, and you’re going to have to figure out what it is that’s in all of that stuff; you’re going to have to develop your own outline. If I were you, I would utilize Walker’s Mind Map and I would just go topic by topic that’s in that chapter. So you would use your mind map, and you would just get a clear picture of all of the moving parts that have been assembled for you in that piece of writing.

If you can do these things it will:

1) greatly increase your chances of understanding what that chapter is about

 2)  increase the chances that you’re going to add this to your long-term memory as opposed to your short-term memory because you’re going to revisit this often.

When you go to study, instead of going directly to the chapter you can always go to the notes that you have taken on the chapter, and you can always go to your mind map if you need to have a quick review of what that chapter is about, and this will help you when you go to study for your big exams.

So these are some of the things that you should use when you are studying anything.

Hopefully this helps.

Vanessa    The APhTI Project
                                                                                                             vw@aphti.com