7 Days to Better Grades

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] As students were tasked with getting all of this into here and when we don't get the results that we want, we think maybe I just need to spend more time, or read it slower, or read it again. No one really tells us how, so we just do whatever feels right. You take notes, you highlight a few phrases here and there, and then you read them over. But what most students don't realize is that our brains are wired to learn in a particular way. Sadly, many of us go through grade school and even university using study methods that work against the brain's natural strengths. But with a deeper understanding of neuroscience, we can learn to stop fighting our brain instead start using it to study smarter [NOISE]. Hi we're Mike and Maddie and we're brothers who love learning. Yeah, we run a YouTube channel about study tips. We built a note-taking app for students and we're full-time doctors dedicated to lifelong learning in medicine. Three years of study and dedication to academic success. Learning how to learn has become a life-changing skill for us. The problem is we were never taught how to learn growing up. It can feel overwhelming to make time to learn how to learn when you're already drowning under loads of schoolwork. We made it simple by repackaging everything we know about studying into a guided seven-day course with the class project to help you apply individual techniques as you learn them. How does this all work? Process of learning involves two steps, [NOISE] understanding and remembering. First, you have to get the information into your brain, and seconds you have to retrieve that information when you need it. On Day 1, we'll [NOISE] start with structuring to help us understand new topics. Then on subsequent [NOISE] days we'll combine teaching and mixing to help deepen our comprehension of even the most complex topics. After we understand the information, it's time to remember. We'll mimic how the brain actually works [NOISE] using spacing and testing to form long-term memory. For your class projects we'll build a calendar together to keep ourselves accountable and overcome roadblocks such as procrastination, distractions, and lack of motivation. We've also prepared a downloadable guidebook with practice exercises that you can always rely on for direction when you feel lost. By the end of the study week, you'll have acquired practical strategies rooted in science to study smarter along with a system that encourages learning beyond the classroom. We can't wait to study together. Let's get started. No matter where you are in your education, this class is designed to re-frame how you approach studying to build lifelong learning systems. This class is for you if you're an overwhelmed high-schooler who spends countless hours rereading the same material without improving your grades, if you're applying to professional school and want to build those sustainable study habits for your rigorous training ahead, or if you're just nervous about studying again because you've been out of school and you feeling rusty, our framework will equip you with strategies, techniques, and methods to streamline this process. [MUSIC] 2. Week Overview: Your Calendar: One thing we always like to say is that if you don't approach your work with a plan, then you're planning to procrastinate. In this lesson, we'll plan out a calendar to stay organized. I'll also introduce the class project, which is a workbook you'll find in the resources below. Throughout this course, we'll be using the workbook to apply the strategies ourselves to prepare for medical board exams. You can watch just to see our thought processes, but I highly encourage you to download the workbook and follow along by applying the skills for upcoming exam of your own. This class is designed to empower you in seven days, but you can go at your own pace. Now, the first thing I schedule into my calendar are non-negotiable things in my life. These include things I enjoy doing or known obligations I cannot miss despite all the work I need to do. For example, I'm watching Shang-Chi with friends on Thursday, I have a hot date this evening, and a haircut appointment on this day. I got to look fresh. Then I'm helping dad with some housework over the weekend. School should not take over your life, but you also need to carve out ample time to study. We want our time to be balanced, and this is why the schedule also needs to be fluid. If an entire day is blocked off for an obligation, say attending your sister's wedding, then make sure you free up time later in your schedule for work. If you consistently realize that the understanding phase of learning takes longer than expected, adapt your schedule moving forward. Be flexible and stay balanced. Now I'm going to schedule school, work, and lectures and then give myself some time to study. Also give yourself 10-15 minutes in the morning to watch one of these chapters, maybe while you're drinking your coffee. Lastly, make sure to schedule in meals, exercise, and most importantly, sleep. More on that later. Keep in mind that a top-performing student isn't the one that studies 10 hours a day, rather it's the student that has a balanced schedule. This includes time to study, time to recover, and time to enjoy life. Planning helps prevent procrastination. It removes any doubt about what you need to be doing so you can stay focused while you work. It also motivates you by providing a reason to wake up in the morning. But most importantly, it keeps you on track to becoming a lifelong learner. Now it's your turn. Flip the calendar in your workbook and let's plan out the seven days you'll spend with us. You can go at your own pace. Things get busy and life happens, we get it, but I'd recommend not taking too much time off in-between lessons because they do build on each other. Here we've outlined seven days for you and it's up to you to fill in the actual date to which you plan to complete it at the top, then you can begin to schedule in your individual tasks and activities. I'm going to start off by using today as day 1, which is December 27th, 2021. Start by scheduling in your non-academic responsibilities first. Get in the habit of scheduling in fitness, self-care, and hobbies, and making it a part of a balanced lifestyle. I prefer exercising in the morning and winding down in the evening with some leisure hobbies. After that, scheduling a morning routine and a night routine. Give yourself at least half an hour to an hour in the morning and night to either wind up or wind down for bed. Then schedule in about 15 minutes of Mike and Maty time, so you can go through the designated lesson for this course. Finally, schedule in the studying or productive work that you plan to do for these days. You can be as detailed as you want for this by the hour, by the time of day, however you want to do this. We encourage you to plan out your seven days before starting the course. Proper planning is crucial for success. Definitely post it on the project page and share it with us and the rest of your classmates to keep yourself accountable. In the next lesson, we'll start discussing how the brain works and the science behind learning. 3. How the Brain Learns: In school we're often told what to learn, but ironically we're rarely taught how to learn. I was always able to get by with a hard work ethic up until medical school. The information just came so quickly and I was struggling to keep up so I had to adjust. There was during this time that I realized how important it is to study smart. Learning how to learn changed everything. Let's use sports as an example. I was a swimmer in high school. I wasn't exceptionally good at the sport, but I was able to compete because we had dedicated coaches who taught us how to train properly, how to warm up, how to avoid injuries, how to improve my form, even what I should eat before and after practice to ensure that my muscles would benefit from the workout. We learned strategy, techniques and methods for success, but my school teachers never did that for me. Focus was always on what I should study for the test, but not exactly how I should study for it. Reflecting back on that now, it would be like my swim coach saying we have a race next week, so make sure you're fast and strong enough to win, and the rest is just up to you. I think a lot of students don't understand that academics work in the same way. But rather than training our body for agility and endurance, we're training our brains for retention and concentration, so that's the first important idea to understand as you continue through this class. Being an academic student is like being a knowledge athlete. Let's use another sports example again. Basketball. There are two steps to scoring points. First, you receive the ball and then you shoot the ball. Obviously, a bunch of things can happen in between like dribbling and stealing and passing. But in the simplest terms, you receive the ball and then you deliver that ball into the basket. Learning works the exact same way. There are two steps to scoring points on an exam, two steps to solving a problem. First, you have to get that information into your brain, and then you have to retrieve that information from your brain to solve problems. A bunch of things happen in between like forgetting and memory consolidation, but at the end of the day, learning involves information going in and information coming back out. We call the first step, that is, information going in, understanding. [NOISE] This step involves making sense of the information we absorbed. How do things work? How are they related to one another and how are they organized?The second step, information going out, we call remembering. Can you recall what you've stored in your memory to solve problems? That's it. The simple two-step process of how our brains are wired to learn. We can't skip one or the other. A balance of both steps are equally important for effective learning. Knowing this, there are two big mistakes that students often make. First mistake is spending too much time with the understanding phase. These students will watch a lecture multiple times or reread their notes 3,4 or five times over again, praying that the information finds its way into their brain and stays there. But they don't spend enough time remembering or retrieving the information. They don't practice applying what they've learned, and so that information doesn't stick and it's forgotten. If you think about how you're actually going to be tested, you weren't given notes to reread on the test yet for some reason, that's how most students study. Instead, you're given questions that can only be answered if you remember what you've learned, so it's extremely important that you find a balance in both steps and spend enough time on the remembering phase of learning as well. The second mistake is trying to remember information before understanding it. These students go straight to making flashcards, just try and memorize as much as they possibly can, and they do so without really understanding what the information means or how it all fits together. Just because you can recite every mathematical theorem in your textbook word for word, it doesn't mean you know how to apply them, but if you invest the time to deeply understand the concepts, you'll have an easier time remembering the details because you can often reduce the answers by thinking logically about the concepts, so be sure to balance your efforts between both stages of learning, understanding, and remembering. 4. Day One: Structuring Connections: Welcome back. It's Day 1 in our seven-day journey. Today we'll begin covering the first portion of the understanding phase. This lesson we'll focus on using structure to organize your studies for better comprehension. With this knowledge, you'll be able to learn new ideas quickly and complex topics thoroughly. The most important factor in understanding information is making connections or associations and relating that information to something you already know. A lot of people think that [NOISE] when you learn something, the brain files it away on a bookshelf or a filing cabinet, but this is not the full picture. It's actually less like a filing cabinet and more like a web or even branches on a tree. A filing cabinet implies that all of our knowledge is divided and separated into individual silos. But if you think about how the brain is actually wired, it's a vast network of interconnected neurons. Knowledge is stored in webs of associations. Every time you learn something new about, let's say Japan, you take that piece of information and attach it to the web so that it's connected to all the relevant knowledge surrounding it. This is all the knowledge you already knew about Japan. When I think about Japan, I'm not just thinking about the country. My brain automatically pulls up associations about sushi, Robin anime, Mount Fuji, samurai and so on. If we retrieve information from our brains in these clusters of ideas, the best way to understand is also by learning through association. This is why we want to avoid memorizing standalone details early on and instead focus on making connections between concepts. So how exactly do we make connections within our studies? Well, there are many ways. I'll define a few that I use with examples from my medical lectures. We have compare and contrast. Compare the similarities and differences between different concepts. For example, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are both diseases that affect our intestines. On the outside, they look the same. But knowing the differences between their pathology and their histology will help me decide between the different treatment options. We can use part and whole. Here you try and break down big ideas into their most basic components to see relationships. For example, our shoulder has many different muscles and tendons. By understanding the range of motion of all the individual flexors and extensors movements, we can deduce which of the many shoulder muscles and tendons are actually injured. These are all ways you can use structuring in your studies. Structuring allows us to categorize information within a framework, giving our information, well, structure. For example, when you're reading a textbook, the table of contents is the author's way of organizing all of that information with structure using part and whole to describe how all the chapters fall under the umbrella textbook. In this case you are borrowing structure from another person who is an expert, but learning how to do this for yourself can also be extremely helpful. Our method for doing this is called the T-tree framework, and it's something that we've also talked about on our YouTube channel. It's called a T-tree because all its parts start with a t, topic, titles, terms, and tables. To build your tree, you start with a topic, which becomes the trunk of the tree. When you're taking a class, usually each lecture is on a separate topic. When you're reading a textbook, usually each individual chapter covers a different topic. When I'm learning new content, my goal is to make a separate tree for every topic. For example, in medical school, there's the topic of cardiology, there's gastroenterology, and there's microbiology. If I just look at the table of contents, each of these have their own chapters and each have their own lectures. I encourage you that when you're building your tree to study for an exam, you can borrow the outline of the topics from your professor's syllabus or straight from the textbook. You can copy the exact structure they use. You don't have to reinvent things from scratch. That was the topic, making the trunk of the tree. Next you add the titles, which will be the branches of the tree. The titles are referring to the different sections within the topic. If you look in your textbook or your lecture slides, you'll see that titles are what divide the sections of each individual chapter. If I'm making a tree on the topic of gastroenterology, my branches of gastro will be all of the individual organs of the digestive system, the esophagus, the stomach, the pancreas, gallbladder, liver, intestines and so on. Moving right along, the next part is the terms which will be the twigs of the branches. If you look again at your chapters and lectures, the terms are the bolded words, the key terms that you have to know from each section. If I were to look at the liver branch, the twigs would be the individual diseases of the liver, like hepatitis, cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma and that sort of stuff. Finally, the last part of the T-tree is the tables, which will make up the leaves of the tree. These are all the nitty-gritty details that you have to memorize. Going again off of our example, if I'm using the twigs cirrhosis, as an example, tables are the details about cirrhosis that I need to memorize. Some examples, tables can be a list, like a list of causes of cirrhosis, alcoholic cirrhosis, NASH cirrhosis, viral hepatitis, or Wilson's disease. Tables can be a process, like what are the steps to treating cirrhosis? That's something I just need to memorize. Tables can be a comparison chart. How is one type of cirrhosis similar or different from another? Keep in mind that while you're building your tree, the leaves aren't the focus. What's important are the branches. How the concepts relate to each other is more important than the ideas themselves. You can always come back later and memorize the details of the leaves. Another strategy similar to T-tree is mind-mapping. With T-trees, you're borrowing the organization from the textbook or your lecture slides, but with mind-maps, you're now trying to understand the relationships more deeply. You start with a topic in the center, and from there you can draw relationships between different topics. Mind-maps work well even without much texts, use sketches, different colors, and arrows to help you understand the relationship between concepts. The goal is to make connections. You might think that these techniques, T-tree and mind-mapping, or making connections in general don't work well for subjects like math, but on the contrary, they are quite powerful. The way math, physics, or chemistry works is that the topics build upon one another. The more math you know, the easier it is to learn more math. A lot of students spend time trying to memorize the steps it takes to solve a math problem, but they don't take time to understand how different math concepts and theorems relate to one another. What is calculus? Why do we learn calculus? What are derivatives? How are integrals different from them? How does Ohm's law compare to Watts law? Working through these logical relationships instead of using them for plug and chug makes understanding much easier. We've just talked about many different structuring strategies to help you understand information. The stronger your associations are when you first learn the information, the less time you'll need to spend reviewing them later on. Getting better at structuring your knowledge is a skill that takes time and practice. One of the best ways to do that is to make meaningful notes. You can see on the left what my notes used to look like compared to what they've evolved into over time, on the right. Although I used to have some kind of organization topics and subheadings and so on, it doesn't actually reflect my thoughts or the way that my brain relates information. Our brains tend to store info and webs of associations more like a mind-map rather than this wall of text. The other improvement here is that my notes have become more visual. Pictures are worth 1,000 words. Instead of literally writing 1,000 words, I've moved towards structuring my thoughts with arrows and diagrams. Notes are meant to be quick and easy to review. These old notes on the left would take a lot longer to read through word for word compared to this mind-map, where I can just quickly see how concepts relate to each other by briefly glancing for a few seconds. Next time you make notes, try this more minimalistic approach. You're not trying to rewrite the entire lecture, that's really passive. Try to actively structure the information in a way that makes sense to you. Reduce the number of words you write, group ideas together, use more pictures and visuals in practice. In the next chapter, we'll talk about techniques to help you understand even deeper. [MUSIC] 5. Day Two: Deepen Comprehension: Yesterday we talked about using structuring for understanding. Now let's talk about one of the best techniques for understanding, which is teaching. Teaching is an active way of learning because when teaching someone, we help them learn the material by portraying our own understanding of it. Teaching also forces us to repackage the messy association webs in our minds into something more comprehensible. If you can't teach a concept to someone else, then do you really understand it? Teaching requires you to put ideas in your own words. Our brains must process the concepts well enough to be able to both explain it and to answer questions about it. When teaching without notes to rely on, a good approach is to visualize your T trees and branches and teach according to that mental structure that you've built for yourself. Here are some tips to strengthen the teaching effect. Teach to someone outside of your class. This prohibits you from using jargon or specialized terminology and forces you to use simpler language. Teach a child. A child is very curious and will constantly ask you why. The more you ask yourself why, the further you break down ideas into their most fundamental parts and the more you understand the concepts at a basic level. You can even teach your friends and family at the dinner table if they're willing to listen, but you don't even have to teach actual people. You could also teach yourself in the mirror or your dog or a stuffed animal. You also don't only have to teach by speaking, you can also write or type it out. Take out a piece of paper and see if you can draw out the T tree from the previous lesson for your topics straight from memory. That's how you should think about teaching. Now let's dive into the actual teaching techniques to improve our understanding. First is the whole-part-whole method. When teaching, sometimes your students will not understand what you taught because you get too lost in the weeds. For example, the Krebs cycle is extremely tedious to look at, where to begin. Using this method, we would first anchor our students to the whole, the big picture idea. Follow it up with a part or detail, and then relate that part back to the whole. For this example, I would identify the whole of the Krebs cycle. It's important for energy and survival. Then I would follow it up with a part covering several key reactions of the cycle. Then I would tie it back to the whole showing why the details matter to the big picture. This provides your pupil with a well-rounded perspective of this complicated topic. Having a crystal clear T tree or mind map of your topics makes teaching in this way incredibly easy. Next is the Feynman technique. To use this method start by explaining a concept to yourself by writing it out in a mental model or structured tree. Once you're finished, take a moment to reflect on your explanation for clarity. Then repeat the explanation but simplify it, and then repeat this approach until you have a well-refined and succinct version. This is not an easy task and often requires many iterations. The most important goal using the Feynman technique is to identify gaps in your knowledge. If there were struggles with explanation or simplification, then we can go back into our studies and address these shortcomings in a more focused way. Now we've covered two very effective ways to use teaching in the initial phase of learning. In the next chapter, we'll discuss how mixing can be a powerful method for understanding. 6. Day Three: Mix It Up to Get Unstuck: This is Day 3 of our journey, and in this video, we'll be talking about how to use mixing [NOISE] in the understanding phase of learning. The idea of mixing involves a two-step approach; learning from multiple different angles and learning multiple topics at once. Let's first talk about learning from multiple angles. To explain the benefits of mixing, let's once again use a sports analogy, this time, baseball. Let's say that you want to improve your swing. You bring up the pitching machine and practice hitting ball over and over again. The best way to actually improve your game is to hit all different types of pitches. If you only practice hitting fast balls, then you only get better at hitting fast balls. But there are other types of pitches as well; slow, curve, granny toss. In order to improve your overall batting, you have to practice all the different types. This idea also applies to studying. In order to improve our understanding and problem-solving skills, we need to approach the material from multiple different angles. What are some other ways that we can diversify our studies? We can consume multiple resources on the same topic, attending lecture and listening to your professor is just one way. Read about it in a textbook, Wikipedia. [NOISE] watch YouTube videos about it, form study groups and teach one another, work with a tutor, take a test prep course. Next, let's talk about mixing to learn multiple topics at once. I'll return to the baseball analogy to explain this as well. To be a well-rounded player, you have to practice catching and throwing and running in addition to just batting. The best way to train all of these skills is to practice each of them every day as opposed to practicing only one of them each day. For example, if you practice batting today but you don't hit a ball again until four days from now, any progress you made will be lost. Instead, you should bat for an hour, then catch and throw for an hour, and then go for a run. Mixing your studies works in the same way. Instead of studying Chapter 1 today, two tomorrow and so on, study multiple topics a day. Better yet, breakup study blocks even further. If you study in three-hour blocks, don't study Chapter 1 for three hours, then Chapter 2 for three hours, and then Chapter 3 for three hours. Mix them all together. Study all three chapters in each three-hour block at the same time to stay sharp on all of the content. How would this look like on a day when you attend school? Well, first preview the lecture the night before going to class. Then go to class to get exposure to it again. Then immediately after class, quickly skim over everything once again. This can help solidify everything you covered. We've now covered the three important pillars of the understanding phase. Starting tomorrow, we'll start diving into the remembering phase. 7. Day Four: Spacing & Timing Revisions: Yesterday we finished off all the chapters about understanding information. Today, we're going to begin with the remembering phase and start with a strategy called spacing, also known to many students as spaced repetition. How does this work? It's extremely difficult to remember every detail about something after only seeing it once. But after the second or third time it becomes easier. The question becomes, how many times should we review it, and how often? This all depends on the science of memory, which can get very complicated. To make it simpler, I'm going to use an analogy. I like to think of remembering different types of topics, as different types of plants. Some plants need more water than others, some plants need less, but just because one plant needs more than another, doesn't mean that we should give it all the water at once. Because over watering our plans doesn't help them grow any faster. Some plants need to be watered several times a week, and some need to be watered only once a week. The key is to find the optimal watering schedule in which our plans can thrive. Memories work in the same way. New memories fade a little faster, compared to older memories that we've already recalled and applied multiple times. The reason why spacing works so well, is because it mimics the signs of memory decay. The more times you review something, the longer you can space out the next review. This means that for something you just learned, you may have to review it again the same day, to make sure it sticks. Then you can gradually space out the next time you review it until tomorrow, and then maybe three days later and so on. Something that you've known for a long time can be spaced out even further to several weeks or even months. Now to give this more contexts, the opposite of spacing is cramming. You've probably heard of how some people pull all-nighters, and cram right before the test. You may have even done it yourself. While you can squeeze a lot of review in a short amount of time, you aren't allowing adequate time between reviews, for your memories to mature. Because remember, over watering your plants don't make them grow any faster. This is why cramming for a test is a terrible idea for retaining information for the long term. That was spacing in a nutshell. Now let's discuss some ways to implement spacing into our studies. First, you'll need to break down your curriculum into digestible pieces that are easy to review. If you use the T-tree from our previous lectures, then these would be the leaves of the tree. As an example, in medicine, we make flashcards and put individual details on each card so it's easy to quantify our reviews. You could also consider breaking down your curriculum into individual topics or problem sets for review. Once you've broken down your curriculum and identify the leaves, you'll need to create a spacing schedule. The most basic way would be to use a shoe box method. If you're studying a schedule that has many leaves, like medicine, for example, then keeping track of the spacing schedule can get very tedious. To solve this issue, I recommend using a computerized algorithm to manage the schedule for you. Maddie and I quickly realized that, letting software handled the spacing schedule allowed us to focus on our work, without the hassle of keeping a track of when to review. This inspired us to build our own App called RemNote. It's basically a note-taking App that automatically turns your notes into flashcards, and then schedule your review sessions for you based on how well do you know each topic. If you're interested, it's free to use. You just go to RemNote.com and make an account. There are other options out there that you can explore as well, but the bottom line here is that you want to outsource all the hassle of spacing, to a programmed algorithm. All you need to do, is plug in your info and you can just start studying. For subjects with fewer but more complex concepts like math or computer science, flashcards can still be very helpful for you to remember how the ideas relate to one another. You'll also need to find time to do practice problems. Spacing can be helpful here if you use a retrospective revision timetable. This is how it works. Now let's go over the class project portion of this lesson. In your workbook, flip to the revision timetable sheet. Here we'll use this template to identify our strong and weak points for our studies. Using this knowledge, we can then guide our studies more effectively, and dedicate more time to areas that need review. Our retrospective revision timetable is unique, and divideed into two columns. In the left column, fill in all the topics you need to review for your exams. You can organize this as Lecture 1, Lecture 2, Lecture 3, by chapters or topics, like cardiology, gastroenterology, etc, however you want to organize your studies is up to you. In this example, I'm just going to use lectures 1 through 5. Now that you have the left column filled out, pick some topics to study that day. Today, which is December 27th, 2021, I'm going to review lectures 1, 2, and 3. In the right column where it says Review, I'm just going to put today's date, next to lectures 1, 2, and 3, at the end of the day, since this is a retrospective revision timetable. I'll go back to my worksheet and color-code, how well I feel I've mastered that information. For example, maybe lecture 1 was easy. I highlight all of my easy lectures in green. Two was difficult. I'll highlight it in red. Three was also easy, so it gets green. Now tomorrow, I'll have lectures 4 and 5,and since 2 was highlighted in red, I'll also review 2 again. At the end of tomorrow, let's say that 4 or 5, we're sort of challenging, but not super difficult. I'm going to highlight them in yellow. Lecture 2 is getting better, but I'm not fully confident yet. I'll also give it yellow. I'll continue this revision method every day until all of my lectures become green for easy. I love this method of revision, because it categorizes our studies by strengths and weaknesses. I can also visually see the last time I reviewed a topic. Say for example, that lecture 1, I initially labeled green. Five or six days go by without retouching it. The benefit is that I can visually see how long it's been since I've studied lecture 1. Maybe I'll throw it back in the queue for my next study session. Not only does a revision timetable help you organize what you need to be studying, It also lets you see how many times you've reviewed each topic. In today's chapter, we've covered many different ways to use spacing, to remember information, using technology to help you keep track of your spacing schedule, is a great way to save time studying. Tomorrow we will explore techniques, to help us better remember what we've learned. 8. Day Five: Active Learning & Testing: Welcome back. Yesterday, we started talking about the remembering phase of learning. We talked about using spacing. Today, we'll talk about testing known by many students as active recall. Testing is exactly what it sounds like. You're testing yourself to see how well you can remember the information without the help of any hints or notes. You can do this with flashcards, practice problems, past papers, practice tests. It's incredibly powerful to combine testing with spacing using flashcards. This is the preferred method for many medical students, but you can also space out doing problems for specific chapters or by practicing essays on certain topics. You could also form study groups where you quiz each other. As long as you don't rely on notes and come up with the answers on your own, you're getting the benefits of testing. We already have a video on YouTube that will give you 12 ways to test yourself. I can link it down below if you want more ideas. The most important aspect of testing is to evaluate your performance. If you forget something or you fail to recall some thing or you get a question wrong, you have to figure out why. Otherwise, you'll keep making the same mistakes. We've had students who just go all out and do three practice tests all in a row and then check their answers at the end, and then quickly realized that they got the exact same questions wrong on every test. How they actually stopped between each test to check their answers and figured out why the wrong answers are wrong and why the right answers are right, then they would've seen some improvement. Now, let's get specific about how we can approach practice problems. The reason why testing is so important is because we're studying exactly as we are going to be tested on the day of the exam. We don't learn by watching. We learn by going through the motions. I can't learn to shoot free throws by watching Kobe Bryant at the line. I need to physically go to the court with basketball and practice. The same goes for learning. I can't learn something by re-reading my book over and over and over. My exams are all closed book, so I have to test myself without peeking at my notes because that's how I will be assessed in the real-world. Now, let's get specific about how we approach multiple-choice practice problems. Many of your future exams will be multiple choice and as such, it's best to prepare for them by also doing practice problems. We want to prepare the exact same way will be tested. We'll be using our systematic approach to multiple choice questions, which is as easy as ABCDE. We've also included the framework in your workbook so you can refer back to it at anytime. For this example, I've pulled up a question from the USMLE Step 1 Exam. It's straight from their free practice tests. So I'm not breaking any rules here. Let's go ahead and use the ABCDE method to answer this question. Starting with A, here's the question and A stands for Align. Align yourself to what the question is actually asking for. This step is crucial, so you don't waste your time reading or re-reading a question without knowing what it's actually asking. Our approach here is to first read the last sentence of the vignette first, then quickly skim the answer choices to orient yourself to what type of question it is and what type of answer choices are available. Going back to our example here, let's go ahead and read and highlight the last sentence of the vignette. Which of the following nerves is most likely injured? Then I'll skim the answer choices. As I expected, they're all different nerves, common fibular, femoral, obturator, surreal, and tibial nerves. Already just by reading the vignettes and skimming the answer choices, I know this vignette is going to give me some clues about sensory or motor loss or something that points towards a particular nerve. The next step is B, which stands for bold. Now, it's time to go back and read the vignette start to finish. Now that we're aligned to the question, we'll bold or highlight any important numbers, buzzwords, or clues that might point to a particular answer choice. Starting from the top, a 14 year old boy is brought to the emergency department after being hit with a baseball bat on the lateral side of his leg immediately below the knee. I think that might be important. So I'm going to highlight lateral side of his leg immediately below the knee. He is unable to dorsiflex his foot. That's probably going to be the most important piece of evidence right there. Then we have the last sentence of the vignette. Now that we've read the question, we move on to C, which means cross out or process of elimination. To do this, we're going to treat each answer choice as a true, false question. Remember that an answer choice that is 99 percent right, but one percent wrong is still wrong. If it's incorrect for any reason, it's wrong so cross it off. Physically, remove it from the blank field. Even if you identify a true answer, make sure to go through all of the other answer choices because some of these exams are tricky and they asked for the single best answer, which also means that multiple answers might be true. Super annoying, I know. Let's go back to our example here and treat all of these answer choices as true or false questions based on the symptoms described in the vignette. Starting with A, the common fibula peroneal nerve. I'm pretty sure this is the right answer because I know that an injury to this nerve causes an inability to dorsiflex the foot or causes foot drop. But I'm just going to continue on looking through all the other answer choices as well. The femoral nerve is incorrect because I know the femoral nerve doesn't cause any foot drop or issues with dorsal flexion. It really just causes some numbness in your medial thigh or your lateral thigh. I'm going to go ahead and cross that one off. Obturator nerve, I'm also pretty sure it is false because this one doesn't have anything to do with the foot's. I'm pretty sure just innervates your hip muscles and some of your thigh muscles. I'm also going to cross that one off. I'm honestly not completely sure what the sural nerve is or even does. I tried to rack my brain has been a few years since I studied Step 1 stuff, but this one, I'm not sure. I'm just going to leave it there. The tibial nerve is probably also going to be incorrect because I remember there's a mnemonic and first aid about the tibial nerve or you can't tip toe or plantar flexor foot. I know that one is the opposite of the peritoneal nerve. Also, can't be right I'm going to cross it off. That just leaves me with choices A or D. Next is D, or decide. After, you've gone through and crossed out all of the incorrect answers that you can, hopefully, there's only going to be one remaining. But if you're caught in a pickle like I am here, you have to decide. Our recommendation here is to just go with your gut. You've prepared well for this exam and odds are, your inkling about the right answer is going to be your best bet. Even if you don't feel 100 percent confident, don't second guess yourself or overthink question unless you've proven to yourself that you are successful second guesser. In this example here, my intuition is telling me that a common fibular nerve is correct. I'm just going to go ahead and decide. Press "Show Answer". Good. That would've been really embarrassing if I got that wrong. Which brings us to the last step E, which is evaluate your performance. Obviously, this only applies to test prep since you won't be able to review your actual tests for standardized exams. But as we mentioned earlier in this video, this step is the most important part of answering questions because we want to improve on our mistakes. This is also why it's super important for your practice problems to have explanations, to know why the right answer is right and the wrong answer is wrong. Which is unfortunate in this example because the NBME doesn't post explanations for these questions, but certain key banks that I use like Your World or Ambas, they do provide explanations for questions and those are very helpful. But in this case, since I don't have explanations, I'm just going to have to do a little detective work on my own. I'm just going to go ahead and google sural nerve. Let's see. The sural nerve is a sensory nerve and the calf region of the leg. Let's see what else. What happens if the sural nerve is damaged? That looks useful. Damage or compression can result in burning pain and diminished sensation or loss of sensation. This nerve passes down the back of the knee along the outside of the lower leg. If I go back to the question, when it says that this boy was hit on the lateral side of his leg immediately below the knee, not the back of the knee. That would have distinguished the two, had I known that, but now I do. Thanks you evaluating my performance. The last thing I want to talk about in this video is how to figure out if you're a good second guesser. Every time that you need to guess on a question, and this only applies when you're practicing for an exam, I want you to make a little note next to that question if you change your answer from what you initially put. Then when you're evaluating your performance in Step E, tally up all the times you changed an incorrect answer to a correct answer or an incorrect answer to another incorrect answer, or a correct answer to an incorrect answer. You'll be able to visually see how many times you change from right or wrong or wrong to right and if the net sum of all of your guessing favors more points, that means incorrect to correct more. Well, good for you. You're a good second guesser.In this chapter, we recover the importance of testing for remembering knowledge. Tomorrow, we'll cover memory techniques to improve retention. 9. Day Six: Long Term Memorization: Welcome back. Yesterday we talked about testing. Today, let's wrap up the remembering phase with a few of our favorite memorization techniques. Keep in mind that memorizing helps us remember information, but it doesn't help us with understanding. I only begin memorizing details after I have a firm grasp of the concepts. But more importantly, and I really want to stress this is that if you've invested the effort to understand the information using our framework, making those associations, then the information will stick much better upfront. In most cases, you won't even need to rely on memorization at all, but sometimes it's unavoidable. For example, in medicine, we get lists of amino acids or lists of drugs to memorize. This type of information is difficult to firmly associate with prior knowledge. For those cases we supplement with memory techniques. The first technique is called chunking, where we group similar concepts together to memorize large quantities of information. A simple example is how we remember phone numbers. We don't try to remember the entire thing in one long string of numbers. Instead we break it down into chunks of three or four. A more specific example from a medical studies is trying to remember all 20 of the amino acids. Trying to remember all 20 at once is difficult, but by chunking them into categories like essential versus non-essential amino acids or polar versus non-polar amino acids, memorizing becomes a lot easier. I want to mention that this method works well with a T-tree because we've already structured concepts together by their associations. Next, let's talk about mnemonics. Mnemonics make use of acronyms or phrases associated with bits of information to help us memorize. They are really helpful for remembering concepts with seemingly no connection or concepts that require a specific sequence. Let's continue using the amino acid example, but let's also combine it with chunking, since we've already grouped them together into categories. To remember aromatic amino acids, I use the mnemonic PFTT because aromatic makes me think of smell and [NOISE] might be a sound you make when you rip bad one. PFTT would be the mnemonic to remember phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan. Here are a few other mnemonics from medical school as examples. You can search the internet for commonly used mnemonics in whatever subject you're studying for, but you can also come up with your own. The more vivid or the more dirty you're mnemonics are, the easier they are to remember. Finally, we have the mind palace, which is the most advanced technique. The mind palace involves crafting an elaborate story and using the details of the story at associations. It's helpful to base the setting of the story in a place that is familiar to you, such as your bedroom or your living room. A mind palace doesn't necessarily have to occur in a real-life setting like your room. You can use imaginary settings as well, as long as you tell yourself a compelling story. Are there a list of ideas or concepts that you need to memorize? Is it a specific sequence? You can try to place each item of what you're learning in specific spots on the page. The more vivid and detailed the imagery the better. Then later on when it comes time to remember all these items, it should be as easy as a walk in the park. In this chapter, we covered three different memorization methods and once again, just to reiterate, because it's so important. Memorization helps you with remembering information, but it doesn't help you with understanding. Now that we've covered all the strategies, techniques, and methods for the entire process of learning, tomorrow we can talk about some skills that will help you stay consistent with your studies. These are the ability to concentrate and to avoid distractions. 10. Day Seven: Boost Concentration: By this point, we've covered both phases of learning from understanding to remembering. Now it's all a matter of putting your tools to use. But how do you ensure that you'll actually get your work done? How do you know that when you sit down at your desk, you'll actually study and not watch anime or go on TikTok. Well, in this lesson we're going to discuss how to train our concentration to stay focused and avoid distractions. Just like how athletes train their endurance for peak performance, we can train our concentration. But before we start our focus training, let's make sure that our environment is set up to be distraction free. This means picking a study spot with no loud noises or sirens nearby, no people distracting you. You want a comfortable seat with good posture, so not your bed. Instead, grab your comfy study sweatshirt. Easy access to water and a bathroom, and difficult access to your phone and social media. Music also matters, and we have many videos on YouTube diving into this topic. But in general, you want to avoid distracting music such as those with lyrics or melodies, or just study in silence. Now that you're settled in, let's start training. Let me ask you, how long can you work before you start to lose focus? The average student can focus for around 25 minutes before their attention starts to waiver. For you, it might be a little more or less, but the goal is to increase that number as much as possible. The only thing we'll need for this exercise is a stopwatch, not a timer, but a stopwatch which most of us already have on our smartphones. If you don't have one, then flip through your workbook to the concentration chapter where you will find a place to record your times. When you want to start studying, start your timer and go. When you notice that your concentration is starting to break, you're reading the same sentence over and over, or your mind is just wandering and you can't remember what you've just read, then now's the time to stop and take a break. Now stop your timer and check how long you were able to stay focused for. Take that number and divide it by four, and that will be how long your break can be. If you feel your focus return sooner, then go ahead and hop back into concentration and you can start your timer again. Remember start your timer from zero each time you're trying to increase that number. Over the next days and weeks, you should notice that the amount of time that you can stay focused for will get longer and longer before you need to take a break. Now one very important note with focused training is that you don't want to push through when you've lost your focus. The best time to take a break is when you start to waiver, not when you're full-blown tired. There are two big reasons for this. The first reason is that it's better to work at 100 percent intensity for even just one hour than it is to work for three hours but only at 50 percent intensity. This is highly inefficient and you can easily burn out. The second reason is that pushing yourself to the limits of being completely tired requires much more time to recover compared to taking smaller intentional breaks. It's very similar to lifting weights at the gym. If you push yourself to the limit and tear muscle, you won't be able to lift again for days or even weeks. You've done. But if you take small breaks at the end of every set and never allow yourself to get completely tired or worn-out, then you can get more reps and each of those breaks will only last a few minutes. Now you're studying and you've decided to take a break. It's important to keep yourself in flow even during your break. When you're studying and you find your groove and you get in the zone, so to speak, your brain actually releases chemicals to allow you to engage in this deep work. When you're taking a break, the goal is to maintain this chemistry, oftentimes with continued movement from your body. It's okay to allow your mind to relax, clear your thoughts, and relieve mental tension, but try to keep the body in motion. Go for a short walk, or do some easy chores around the house, or even just sit there and move your body through deep breathing. It's like your mind and body are a tag team. When you're sitting down to study, you're using your mind more than your body. But when you're taking breaks, your mind tags out to rest and your body takes over to help you stay focused. Now that you have a training routine, it's all a matter of getting your reps in every day. You want to make sure that the time you've blocked off on your calendar to study is actually used to study and not be distracted. This all depends on your environment as well as how well your concentration muscles have been trained. Now let's discuss the class project portion of this lesson. In your workbook, there's a page called Focus Training. I want to go over how to use this sheet to record your sessions and track the progress of your training. The page is simple and divided up into three sections. On the left, fill in the date. Today is December 27th, 2021. Over time, you'll be able to visually see your focus improve and how quickly it took you to get there. Likewise, if you notice a decrease in focus or stagnant growth, this is an opportunity to step back and re-evaluate why. It's totally fine to have multiple studies sessions in the same day. Actually it's encouraged. The middle column is where you'll record the length of your focus sessions. Remember, we're using a stopwatch here and not a timer. This is the number that we hope will improve over time. Finally, on the right is the break column. This column requires a little bit of math. Use the equation session time divided by 4 to calculate how long you should take a break for before returning to focus. We've also included this equation at the bottom of the sheet, just in case you forget, along with a legend about what the columns mean. For example, let's say that on my first study session of today, the 27th, I was able to study for 30 minutes. So I'll enter in 30 minutes in the middle column and then calculate how long I'm going to take a break for. I'll divide 30 by 4 and calculate my break to be 7 and 1/2 minutes, which I can fill in right here. Since I plan to continue focused training today, I'll just enter in the same date in the next line, and I'll repeat this process until I finish studying for today. That's how you use the focus training table. Feel free to share your progress with the class where everyone can see the laser focus that you've been training. With that, I want to congratulate you on completing your seven-day journey with us, keeping in mind that this is only the beginning of your adventure towards life-long learning. Join us in the next chapter where we'll wrap up final thoughts and send you on your way. 11. Bonus: Motivation & Procrastination: By now you should have all the strategies and methods for a more effective and scientific learning routine. You should also have started training your concentration to ensure that you get your work done. As you move forward beyond our course, there are many roadblocks you might encounter along the way. I want to take this time to address two of the most common ones. Those are procrastination and motivation. Both of these mental roadblocks work in a very similar way. They both make it very difficult to get started or to finish a task. Most people think that in order to take action, we need motivation to do it. That we needed a strong reason or some emotional inspiration to make us take action. But in reality it's not a linear process. I like to think of it as a wheel. Yes, motivation leads to action, but action also leads to motivation. It's a positive feedback loop. Instead of waiting around for motivation, you can take action, and from that, get the motivation for more action. The same with procrastination. Sometimes you don't feel like jumping back on the wheel of action. You might be emotionally distracted and thus procrastinate from getting started or even finishing your studies. The answer here, again, is to take action to ease you into it so that it helps you overcome that activation energy. Taking action might sound easier said than done. But if you think about it, we take action on things everyday without thinking. These habits that we've built over time have become effortless. Like brushing your teeth or making your bed or going out of your way to the coffee shop to wait in line to buy coffee. All of these things we can do without even thinking, without any emotional roadblocks. As you can see, both motivation and procrastination are highly emotional states. To overcome them, I've relied on highly unemotional practices to help me take action, things like habits and discipline. Here are a few more tips to help you take action. First is to use friction to your advantage. Make it easy to start things you want to do. Keep your study materials organized, have a dedicated, convenience study spot, figure out efficient ways to acquire your caffeine. On the flip side, make it difficult to start things that you don't want to do. Remove or lock while your video games, put a really long password on your TV streaming accounts, make that barrier to entry really high. Second is to turn one big goal into smaller tasks. The thought of having to read three chapters today can be daunting. But don't think about it in that way. Instead, break it down into something more manageable. Instead of reading three chapters, focus on just reading three pages or even three paragraphs. More often than not, I find that after doing the smaller chunks, I've achieved enough motivation to keep going. With that, I encourage you to post your calendar in the class projects section. Post it where we can all see it and where all your other classmates can see it too. Put yourself out there, take accountability and responsibility for your own learning. If you catch yourself slipping up some days, that's okay. Just keep going. You're not finished when you stop. You're only finished when you don't start again. Happy studies, guys.