alt Hacker NewsThe book Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger and McDaniel is helpful. tl;dr of it is:
- lots of low-stakes quizzing and practice
- spaced repetition
- reflect on what you've learned and what you could do better next time, and apply these lessons in different contexts
- interleave practice of different but related topics
- try to solve a problem before being taught the solution
- distill the underlying principles to different problems
- remember that if learning is easy, you probably aren't engaging you brain very much
This will help streamline the process, but obviously there's just a limit to what you can take in.
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Not just a limit. Different people have different personalities. And different subjects have specific mechanism required for mastery(eg Surgery vs Philosophy). So different people fit different learning mechanisms. Then the problem is about awareness of where you fit and skill at coordination with others who fit elsewhere.
All these things presume actual interest and savviness about the topic present in the student beforehand, which is precisely what most students that struggle with studies lack.
Very good tips.. I always mess up when doing spaced repetition since I don't take notes, I try to re-read the whole previous material in the book again and I get demotivated that I have to read all that so that I remember all the previous material. Do you know a way to get out of this habit?