In school and college, I worshipped past papers and flashcards. After each lesson, I’d transfer information from my notes to Quizlet and begin the memorisation process, effectively drilling facts into my brain. With past papers, I applied this knowledge and picked up on patterns in the questions, honing my ability to predict exam content and construct answers for different types of questions. And all of this revision was reflected in my grades. Smugly, I thought I’d cracked the code for effective studying.
I was wrong.
University taught me that the study system I thought was the King of Learning was in fact a mere peasant in the kingdom of study methods. I was drowning in information. To stay afloat, I realised that I had to change my approach to learning – and fast.
I dived head-first into the study space of the internet and geeked out on learning methods, eventually resurfacing with ideas I’ll be sharing below.
Learn How to Learn
Learning how to learn may sound like a dorky pass-time, but it’s one of the best ways to invest your time at uni – even better than actually studying – until you know the basics. Once you know the most efficient way to study, you’ll be able to learn the same amount in less time, leaving you with more to spend on other aspects of life.
The key to surviving and thriving as an independent learner in the university environment is by making the transition from surface learning to deep learning.
And in this article, I’ll be exploring how to make that transition.
But first, let’s diagnose: do you have any of the most common symptoms of being a surface learner?
- You try to hammer facts into your brain with flashcards.
- You make notes, read and re-read them, but nothing seems to stick.
- You often feel overwhelmed by the mountain of stuff you have to memorise.
- You complete past paper after past paper, but have difficulty answering unfamiliar questions.
If any of these statements ring true for you, you’re probably in the realm of surface learning. If not, you may already be a deep learner, which is great! In this case, you may want to focus on improving your encoding efficiency (more on this later).
While surface learning involves mindlessly (often manically) memorising random bits of information, deep learning requires diving beneath the surface of a subject so that you can uncover relationships between ideas.
Even if you’re mostly a surface learner, you’ll sometimes enter the ‘deep’ territory of learning by chance. But I’m sure you don’t want to leave your grades to chance.
So, instead of just watching lectures, taking notes and hoping we’ll understand and memorise everything at some point along the way, we need to be able to decide when to enter deep-learning-mode. And to develop this ability to decide, we first need to clarify the difference between understanding and memorisation…
Understanding vs. Memorisation
Studying doesn’t have to be this frantic cram-as-much-info-into-brain-as-possible pre-exam ordeal. It can be a leisurely stroll of gradual knowledge accumulation (i.e. memorisation), coupled with an ever-deepening understanding of your subject matter – provided you don’t leave things to the last minute! Even still, in just a week or two, you can probably cover a lot of ground in a lot of detail with the correct approach.
To find this ‘correct approach’, you’ll need to remember this: understanding something automatically induces memorisation, but memorisation does not require understanding. And this is where the danger of mindless memorisation lies: memory with minimal true understanding may work for GCSEs and A-levels, and can even produce top grades. But at university? It’s a surefire way to dig yourself a trench of stress and commence an exam war that you’ll be doomed to lose from the start.
University exams don’t have the clear, accessible mark schemes and rigid, predictable structure of A-level and GCSE exams. So in order to perform well, you’ll need a thorough, genuine understanding of your subject that can only be achieved by shifting from mindless to mindful memorisation.
Memorisation: Mindless vs. Mindful
You know when you keep writing and rewriting notes, trying to etch them into your brain? Or when you stick every piece of information you discover onto a flashcard and then rigorously (or casually) test yourself? That’s called rote learning.
Here’s a more formal definition:
“Rote learning is the process of memorising specific new items as they are encountered.”
Rote learning is the mechanism for mindless memorisation, which is a manifestation of surface learning.
Without considering where a piece of information slots into the broader concept, you immediately queue it for memorisation. This results in your brain containing lots of isolated, random facts that can easily disappear from your brain’s memory mesh, because you haven’t tied them to anything else that’s better established in your neural network. And as a result, your retention decays rapidly…
The Forgetting Curve
You may have heard of Ebbinghaus’s ‘forgetting curve’:
After first learning something, our memory of it will decay with time. After reviewing our notes, the memory curve will follow the same decay shape but decline more slowly. With every review, the forgetting curve flattens until our retention is near perfect.
But with mindful memorisation, we can hack the forgetting curve…
The ‘knowledge level’ is the same for each mode of memorisation after the same amount of time, but for the mindful case, no reviews were required. The point is this: memorising mindfully will allow you to retain more information with less effort.
But what is mindful memorisation?
In short, it’s the process of linking new information with concepts that you already know and building a web of interconnected knowledge.
The result is that you’ll have a well-organised brain, making it much easier to remember and retrieve information on demand (e.g. in an exam).
This process of tying information to existing mental frameworks is called encoding. Encoding is the mechanism of mindful memorisation, and there are many encoding techniques you can experiment with. Here’s a general overview of what encoding involves:
Whenever you meet a new piece of information, before immediately tossing it on the pile of ‘things to be memorised’, assess whether it’s related to something you already know. You’ll often do this subconsciously, but sometimes, the relationships between ideas are less obvious and you’ll have to do some conscious sleuthing to find them.
Then, use a ‘zooming-out’ technique, like mind mapping (the right way) to outline these connections without getting bogged down in the details.
But before you jump into encoding stuff, you’ll want to lay some foundations to build your knowledge upon by priming your brain.
Priming
I’m borrowing an analogy from Justin Sung (a StudyTuber):
You’re moving into a new accommodation room. How would you approach the task? Would you:
- Fling all of your stuff randomly around the room, and then organise everything from there, or…
- Decide how you’ll organise everything, and then place your stuff into the appropriate places?
When I was moving into my student accommodation, I did the former. Not the wisest decision… but it sorted itself out eventually.
And this is comparable to surface learning – it’s the brain’s equivalent to dumping things in a room and expecting it to organise itself.
However, I’m sure you’d agree that option 2 is most efficient, and this is analogous to priming. Priming is about getting the overall gist of a subject before honing in on the specifics.
Here’s how it works!
First, skim over your lecture notes or a relevant textbook to get an overview of the content you’ll be trying to encode. Then, create a rough mental (or physical) outline of the material – a framework – based on your current understanding of the subject.
As you read, slot the ideas into your framework; you’ll have to shuffle and update the framework as your understanding of the content becomes more accurate.
The aim here is to build ‘shelves’ in your mind to help you store and organise information. Initially, it might be difficult to mould this framework mentally, so you could note it on paper or some digital system. Over time, you’ll find it easier to hold and adapt the outline in your head as your cognitive load capacity expands.
Summary
If you want to succeed at university-level education, you’ll need to transition from surface learning to deep learning (if you haven’t already). And to do that, you’ll need to memorise things mindfully, not mindlessly. Mindful memorisation allows you to organically improve your understanding of your subject and involves encoding, which should be done after priming.
Here’s a diagram to represent everything we’ve discussed:
Side note: creating these types of diagrams for whatever concepts you’re learning is a powerful way to encode them. Generating diagrams helps you to grasp the big picture of how ideas relate and operate together.
Ultimately, by learning how to learn (deeply), you’ll save yourself time, hassle, stress and be left with more energy to spend on having a life.
Feature image by Kyle Gregory Devaras on Unsplash.