How To Study Anything Part 2

I’ve taught a lot of students…I haven’t really done a count of how many students I’ve had, but I will tell you that it’s somewhere in the thousands of students that I’ve had, and this is something that I teach my students to do. You have to chunk your material into small parts. You have to, in order to be effective and masterful!

There’s another thing that comes before all of this that I’ve just said- you need to know what type of learner that you are. I’m not talking slow and fast here; I’m talking about how your brain breaks down material. Some of us are audial learners, some of us are visual learners, and then some of us are kinesthetic learners.

 Many of us are actually a combination of two, sometimes three, rarely all three, but sometimes people are a combination of two different learning styles. You need to know how you retain information. Like for myself, I know that I am an audial learner, meaning that if you tell me something I will remember it more so than if you told me to read something, or if you tell me to do something. You know with some things I’m not the most mechanically inclined person but I’m not the least mechanically inclined person either. I mean I assembled my own distilling apparatus in chemistry, so you know, I can put things together but it’s not my strength. My strength is through my hearing; that’s me. 

So if you’re a person that’s musically inclined… if you’re a person, let’s say that you’re watching a television program and you remember the jingles of the commercials…I remember the jingles of commercials for years, for twenty and thirty years. I could tell you that when I was a child, the Breyers ice cream commercial used to scare me because it started with thundering and lightening; those things- sounds- tend to stick with me. So if I’m studying something, I’m going to want to put that in the format that my brain accepts as quickly as possible. So if it’s something that is written, I’m going to want to read that aloud. I’m going to use the other tools like Walker’s Mind Map, but I’m going to make sure that when I visit this material, I’m going to visit it through my ears because that’s the way that I retain information.

If you are audial then what you want to do is you want to read your chapter, and you want to record it. Record yourself reading that chapter, that way you can play it over and over and over again. We are in the generation where everyone has some sort of device where they’re listening to something, so why not put your notes in audio format and that way you can listen to your notes on the go. 

Now you might not be like me, you might have been the child that your mom was always saying ‘are you listening to me?’ that might be you. For example, my husband, I could talk to him all day long ( and just know in my mind that I have communicated with him) and he will retain a portion of what I said to him, but if I show it to him, he’s going to retain a greater percentage of it. He is visual; he’s actually visual and kinesthetic.  So if you are a visual learner, what you must do is you must write it out. You have to write things out so that way it trains your eye to see it, because that is the way that you retain information.

If you’re good at reading maps, if you’re good at not only reading maps but if you’re good at spatial relationships- for example if you can go to a place one time and six months later someone says to you I need you to take me to the place that you took me to six months ago, and you’re able to find that place that you went to six months ago without having gone there in the interim, then you’re probably a visual learner. You’re probably good at types of math that involve space like geometry, like trigonometry. You probably excel in those types of subjects if this is you.

So you’re going to have to write things out, you’re going to have to draw diagrams and schematics to help you to retain the information.  If you’re visual then you want to use flashcards. Flashcards are excellent for the visual learner, and the thing about flashcards that I really like is that you can get them in different colors, you can get them bound, you can them unbound, you can take them just about anywhere; they are extremely portable. 

Then we get to the kinesthetic learner. The kinesthetic learner is the one that learns by doing. They learn by doing, so you’re going to have to take what you are reading and you’re going to have to put it into that format. And you’re probably saying ‘well Vanessa, how do I do that?’ The way that you do that is you’re going to have to implement other things. You’re going to have to take field trips. You’re going to have to concentrate on anything that would allow you to put your hands on that particular thing. So you may have a little bit more work to do, as opposed to the other learning styles. 

For example, my husband is very proficient at building things, and he’s very mechanical. He is the type of person that he can look at the diagram of something, and he can go and build that particular thing because he’s visual and kinesthetic. So he works on cars, he does all of these things; he’s able to see something in its elemental parts, and then act on that and put it together. This is a good quality to have. So instead of him reading about a particular thing, he’s actually going to look to find out who’s doing that particular thing. He’ll use something like, if he wants to learn something new, instead of listening to it or instead of just reading it although he’s visual, he will go to a place like YouTube and he’ll watch them actually put it together (or take it apart). That enhances what he’s able to do because he’s visual and kinesthetic.  

The bottom line is this, when you are receiving the information, you need to adapt it into the style that will enhance your learning.  Afterward, you can develop it into the other learning styles to suit your need.

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

Hopefully this helps.

Vanessa    The APhTI Project
                                                                                                           vw@aphti.com