[helterskelter]

The 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.

[CaptWorld]

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?

[naishoya]

Start taking notes.

[j5dgx76]

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.

[dartharva]

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.

[helterskelter]

Actually, some of the research they base their advice on was performed on elementary school students, and college classrooms which had poor attendance; ie, not the most engaged students. Simple things like giving elementary students an ungraded quiz right before class (to force recall) two or three times a week raised grades substantially, and a college class that switched from midterms/finals to 9 quizzes plus a final not only had higher attendance, but also had much higher grades on their finals with basically none of the students falling behind. Another experiment had young kids practice throwing beans bags into a bucket, one group alternating practice between 2 and 4 feet, and another only practicing at 3 feet. After a month or two, they were tested on throwing the bag into the bucket at 3 feet and the kids who practiced at 2 and 4 feet performed significantly better than the kids who only practiced at 3. Anyway, my point is that small, simple changes to how you study can have big implications for retention, without too much extra effort.

Sorry, I'm still reading this book right now and it's super interesting.

[yorwba]

Yes, if you have something like a classroom setting with a teacher who can just tell students to do things, that can serve as an external motivator for students who lack intrinsic motivation otherwise.

But when you just grab a pile of learning resources off the internet, the teacher doesn't come included. You need to be at least motivated enough to become your own teacher, or else find a way to have someone else supervise your self-study.

[helterskelter]

interweave*

[ellefire]

No, it is interleave in this case https://www.retrievalpractice.org/interleaving