Tag: Studying

Blog: Writing Tests vs. Mastery

Last week, I did something pretty awesome.  I scored 100% on my second comprehensive test for the biology course I’m taking.  Comprehensive Test 2 covered the five chapters on the nervous system, the endocrine system, the cardiovascular system, special senses, and blood.  Thus far, each of the tests I’ve written follow a predictable pattern, where the first half of the test is some version of true-false, fill in the blank, multiple choice, and matching questions, then the second half of the test is split usually between short answer and labeling a diagram.  Understanding this format allows me to structure my studying to answer these questions.  I know that the bulk of the points will be found in the diagram and short answer, so if I can memorize the structural components (from my diagramming study cards) and their functions (from my development of mental schemas), I can usually work out the rest through context, associations, etc.  With this approach, I don’t have to memorize every tiny bit of information because I can make educated guesses based on available information.  This is the same approach that is coached when you are preparing for intensive exams, like SATs and GREs.  You don’t need to know everything; you just need to know enough to eliminate the impossible and approximate the answer enough to make a choice.

On one level, this has yielded huge dividends for me in studying.  Thus far, I’ve completed two-thirds of the tests, and in 13 tests, I’ve only scored below 90 on three tests (86, 87, and 89).  Everything else has been 90% and above.  It’s a lot like the pareto 80/20 rule – I focus on the smallest batch of material that creates the greatest value.  It’s efficient – I don’t need hours upon hours of work invested into the project.

Yet, I have a huge nagging problem with this approach.  If I’m being honest, the conclusion I wrestle with is that while I’m doing great in this biology course, the only thing I can be sure of is that I’m really good at writing tests.  But, does that mean I’m gaining any level of mastery over my material?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of mastery and apprenticeship.  I intent to read Mastery by Robert Greene over the summer, and I’ve read So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work by Cal Newport, all of which tackle the concept of learning and mastery of material.  I value going beyond superficial understanding and reaching towards mastery.  In paramedicine, I see this as the bridge that allows you to adapt in the field beyond doing first aid.  You connect ideas and have a deeper understanding of the situation.  You are more adept at observation and can digest more details and facts; you can make better diagnoses because you can acquire and process more information.  At least, this is what I believe at this point.  I could be horribly off the mark.

If my goal is to be House but in an ambulance, then I feel like being good at writing tests gives me a false sense of accomplishments.  It’s too early to determine if I’m “getting it,” but it’s something I need to be mindful of.  One problem with my undergraduate and graduate experience is that I lack the discipline to do truly deep thinking and work.  I am very clever, and have thus far skated by on having a good memory for facts and connecting ideas.  But I also feel like a bit of a fraud, or more charitably, a dilettante.  Being clever won’t be enough to help save lives.  To do that, I’ll need something more than wit.

Study Strategies #4 – Diagramming

My study habits have come a long way since I first entered university.  In high school, there was less of a reliance on reading textbooks for information, and instead textbooks helped explain concepts that were duly taught during class.  The most you would often get out of a textbook was the bank of practice questions assigned for homework.

When I entered university, it was the first time I owned my course textbooks.  I could do what I wished with the pages (assuming I had no intention to resell the book after the semester).  Yet, if you thumbed through my textbooks from first and second year, you’ll see the pages are still unmarked and relatively pristine.  And yes, I am a pack rat and still have my textbooks from 10-years ago.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I began to annotate my  textbooks.  It started with encountering words I didn’t know the definition to.  I would underline the word, then copy the dictionary definition at the bottom of the page.  From there, I began underlining key ideas, starring important paragraphs, and eventually I would jot keywords in the margins to allow me to scan a page to understand what was being discussed.  This practice eventually carried over to my personal reading.  Now, if you open books I’ve read over the last five or so years, you’ll see this practice used fairly frequently.

Studying biology is proving to be a special case, because in addition to reading the text book, I am required to explain how certain systems function, fit together, and are structured.  I’m a visual and systems learner: I learn best when I can visualize a concept and understand how the various parts work together.  So, to learn the body, to label diagrams on tests, and to explain physiological processes, I have turned to diagramming when I make my flashcards.

Studies have suggested that students who write notes longhand have better recall than students who take notes on laptops.  It is believed that the act of handwriting information triggers better encoding of the information and better recall both in short-term and long-term follow-ups.  I believe some of the same processes are at work when you are learning materials from a book.  Underlining or highlighting material for retention is passive and requires little cognitive work to process compared to copying information.

This is not to suggest that there is only one way to study.  Many people have many styles of learning.  What we can generalize from this, though, is that forcing yourself to engage with the material actively (i.e. copying information, summarizing the text, creating flashcards) will help with recall in most people over engaging with the material passively (i.e. reading and highlighting the text).

 

You do not have to be an artist to diagram.  Trust me.  You can still diagram using stick figures so long as the information you are drawing is meaningful to you.  In the example below, I was trying to figure out a way to easily remember all 11 systems of the body.  I broke the systems down into body regions, and memorized the number of systems per region to help me remember which systems were primarily located where.

  • 1 Head – Integumentary (outer skin) System
  • 2 Head – Skeletal System
  • 3 Head – Muscle System
  • 4 Head – Nervous System
  • 1 Neck – Endocrine System
  • 1 Thorax – Lymphatic System
  • 2 Thorax – Cardiovascular System
  • 3 Thorax – Respiratory System
  • 4 Thorax – Digestive System
  • 1 Pelvis – Urinary System
  • 2 Pelvis – Reproductive System
http://rhuckle.tumblr.com/post/136887273846/im-studying-human-anatomy-and-physiology-at-the

The reason I find diagramming helpful the most is because encoding the information becomes easy when you have to create spacial relationships between parts of the whole.  For biology tests, you often are required to label diagrams.  You can try to brute-force the recall by memorizing the individual parts and what order the fall on the label lines.  When you are forced to draw the parts, you must make sense of how the pieces fit together if you are to get the proportions correct.  For all the parts to fit on your diagram, they must be spaced correctly.  This is incredibly useful when you must go back to label the parts, because you know how each part connects by virtue of your drawing them out.

Diagramming can be a powerful tool to help you learn material quickly and efficiently.  It does take longer than simply underlining or copying out blocks of text, but if you invest the time, it will pay off come test time.

Stay Awesome!

Ryan

*Sources

Mueller, P. Oppenheimer, D. The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science June 2014 vol. 25 no. 6 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/6/1159

Study Strategies #3 – Build a Schema

When you first start out in any new field of study, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content you need to learn.  Everything seems important and complex; you don’t know where to start or what to focus on.  At this stage, an effective strategy is to start building a schema – a system or pattern of organizing information into categories and relationships.  In any mature field of study, you have one thing that is guaranteed: all knowledge gets built upon some sort of bedrock facts, and many complex systems are born from smaller, simpler systems.  All education is structured around this core approach.

Think back to when you started your formal schooling.  You learn math by first:

  • learning the names and symbols for numbers;
  • then learning the cardinal order of numbers;
  • then learning how to sum groups pairs of numbers;
  • then learning how to sum multiple groups of numbers (multiplication);
  • etc.

You can find a similar pattern with almost any subject you have been exposed to.  We sometimes forget this pattern of organization because we take for granted how long it took to ingrain these concepts into our thinking.

Textbooks (at least, at an introductory level) are also organized in this pattern, and by recognizing this, you can use it to build a mental representation of the information.  Textbooks start with defining concepts before moving on to grouping these concepts into meaningful, larger systems, then showing you how to apply these concepts in meaningful ways.  Recognizing this pattern allows you to digest new content much easier than memorizing facts randomly.  The long term benefit of organizing these schemas is you can:

  1. easily assimilate new ideas and facts;
  2. learn and retain more facts
  3. allow cross-domain pollination of ideas to create new insights and assimilate new applications of information

The important thing to remember is to build schemas that make sense to you.  Your instructor or textbook will suggest a way of grasping the concept, but it’s up to you to determine how best to organize your mental models to ensure information is available in your memory when you attempt to recall it.  Employing useful tools such as mnemonic devices, word associations, imagery, auditory cues, etc. can help your mind encode data into useful chunks for storage.  In a future post, I’ll come back to these tools and explore how I’ve applied them in my own studies.  The important lesson for today is to recognize that any body of knowledge has an inherent structure to it.  Once you recognize that structure, you can break big, scary ideas down and tackle each part separately.

 

Study Strategies #2 – Make it about you

A common complaint you hear from students who study abstract concepts is that it’s hard to wrap your mind around ideas that you don’t have immediate (visceral) experience in.  I say this as a person who has an undergraduate and a graduate degree in philosophy; abstract ideas are my bread and butter.  Studying biology falls somewhere in the middle of that field – we all have a body that is a biological system, but outside of our subjective experiences of stimuli and physiological responses, we don’t have a lot of access to the inner mechanics of how the body operates.

(In my humble opinion, philosophy falls to the right of the image… Image: XKCD: https://xkcd.com/435/)

While this tip might be harder to apply in philosophy, a useful trick I’ve tried using recently is trying to break down anatomical and physiological processes in terms of my own personal experience.  Depending on your background, there are a number of ways you can cash this out, but I’ll give you three examples of where I’ve applied my past experiences and hobbies to learn key ideas and concepts.

1.) First Aid

The biggest crossover with studying biology I’ve had is from my experience in first aid.  During my undergrad, I joined a campus first aid team.  It was a team of student volunteers who actively trained throughout the year and covered shifts for events on campus.  Because we trained above the standard first aid level, we would get into topics that required some level of understanding the organism at the physiology level.  To understand how CPR mimicked the beating of a heart, we would learn how a normal heart functioned; to understand how shock affected the body, we would understand the cardiovascular, respiratory and nervous system operated; etc.

First aid is a stripped down version of what paramedicine is, so the two naturally dovetail with each other.  As I work my way through the course material, I’m able to see the connections between the medical interventions I was taught as a first aider and the biological systems the body uses to maintain healthy function (or, related to emergency medicine, how the body adapts to compensate for a loss of homeostasis).

2.) Lifting Weights

This example draws on a narrow set of my course materials, but it still cuts broadly through the textbook.  When you move out of the rookie phase of lifting weights, you naturally drift towards learning about anatomy and physiology.  As of writing this post, I completed a test last week where I labelled a diagram of the posterior superficial muscles entirely based on my experiences with weight-lifting.  As you dive deeper into exercise science, you are exposed to all sorts of cool applications of biology.  You learn about the gross skeletal and muscular anatomy, you learn about cellular metabolism and the use of ATP in muscle contractions, about how micro-tearing of tissues builds muscle and bone density, how nutrition affects the body, etc.  Even learning about exercise recovery helps deepen your exposure, such as learning about massage therapy, stretching any fringe forms of therapy, such as myofascile release and chiropractic medicine.

3.) That time I broke my ankle

A few years back, while out walking the dog during the first snowfall of the season, I was attacked by a roving horde of snow-ninjas who managed to put me down hard.  By that, I mean my foot slipped on a patch of ice, my ankle pivoted, inverted and my bodyweight came down on my ankle.  At the time, it seemed like a sprain because I was able to stand on the ankle and walk down the hill for help.  After a trip to the hospital and a follow-up, x-rays determined that I had a fine fracture in the fibula and I had displaced the talus bone.  It was recommended I have surgery to set the bones back into place with a series of screws and a plate.

The surgery was uneventful and the recovery went as predicted, and I’m now back to 99% (the occasional cold night makes my ankle stiff at work).  There is an element of black box magic that happens when you recover from a broken bone.  You receive a cast, are told to reduce movement for 6 weeks, then rehabilitate the muscles.  Recently, when I was studying the chapter on bones, I learn what happens in those six weeks.  It’s freaking awesome!

Assuming you can see the image above (being new to blogging, I’m not sure what’s considered fair-use for copyright materials – safe to assume, that image is not my creation), you can see the general phases of how bone gets repaired by the body.  When I learned about the process of osteogenesis, I was able to remember the phases of bone repair base on my lived experience of breaking a bone and healing from surgery.  It’s a hard and painful way of learning medicine, but it’ll stick with you!

These are a few examples of how my experiences help me make sense of the complexities of human anatomy and physiology.   What are some of the ways you make the material relevant to your life?  Let me know down below.  Hopefully it’s nothing as bad as physically injuring yourself!

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Pass the Salt – Public Health and Hidden Prophylaxis

At this stage of the game, almost everything I’m studying comes with “OH! That’s so cool!” moments.  For as weird and complex as things that we engineer are, they pale in comparison to just how marvelous our bodies are.  Through eons of evolution, our bodies have developed finely-tuned, complex systems to keep us going.  In general, our bodies are fairly robust and can tolerate a wide variety of environmental pressures because our bodies have adaptive mechanisms to bring the body into homeostasis, or physiological balance.  Without our conscious thought, our body will enact certain measures to protect us, such as breaking down bone matrix to release stored calcium, or shunting blood from the extremities during extreme cold to protect vital organs.  However, sometimes our bodies need some help.

Humans, in our marvelous capacity, migrated into all sorts of areas that we were not adapted to naturally.  Evolution selects for traits that best ensures reproductive survival in particular environmental conditions.  But evolution is slow in humans because we reproduce fairly slowly, so we often take a long time to develop protection against environmental changes.  To help mitigate harm, modern society has adopted many practices to ensure populations are protected from certain diseases and conditions.  Over time, we grow accustomed to the new norm and collectively forget what life was like before the intervention was introduced.  This is why I find public health so fascinating – there are so many systems built into western societies that we take for granted that were enacted to address specific diseases.

 

Goiters

At the moment, I’m studying for my endocrinology chapter test, so I’m learning about the complex systems of glands and hormones our bodies use.  When I say it’s complex, I mean it’s COMPLEX!  Outside of the nervous system, the endocrine system is what is responsible for keeping our body functioning.  It finely tunes our internal conditions to preserve homeostasis.  It does its best, but sometimes it needs some support.

Vitamin and mineral deficiencies can have dramatic impacts on our bodies.  One in particular is iodine deficiency.  In certain geographic areas, iodine is scarce in the food supply.  This problem doesn’t exist where diets are rich in seafood or foods grown in proximity to saltwater.  However, in the interior regions of North America, iodine is less common in the ground, so the nutrients are not absorbed into the local vegetation.  Humans need iodine in their diet for, among other things, healthy thyroid functioning.  The cells of the thyroid uses iodine in part of protein synthesis, so when iodine levels are low, protein synthesis is stalled and extra material accumulates in the tissues.  This leads to an enlarged thyroid, also known as a goiters.  This effect is so common among people with iodine-deficiency that large geographic populations exhibit similar physical characteristics.  In the United States, the phenomena was so common that the “goiter belt” was used to describe areas of the country where people commonly had the affliction.  In addition to physiological problems that arise from atypical thyroid functioning, iodine-deficiency also can result in impaired cognition.

As a public health measure, it was proposed that iodine be added to table salt, as was done in other countries like Switzerland.  Within a short amount of time, incidents of goiters declined and IQ scores were improved in goiter belts.  The practice is now common in developed nations, but according to estimates iodine-deficiency still afflicts some 2-billion people worldwide.

The funny irony with public health initiatives is that we often forget why the measures were enacted in the first place when we are no longer exposed to the diseases the prophylaxis was implemented to address.  This collective-forgetting of the harm our populations were once exposed to then leads to foolish rejections of those very policies that help keep us healthy, whether it’s rejection of vaccines or decrying fluoride in drinking water.  Legitimate questions of long-term exposure effects aside, knee-jerk reactions to chemicals and scientific illiteracy is reversing decades of public health initiatives that keep us healthy.  The hidden world of public health — when it works, you don’t even know it’s keeping you alive.

So, that’s why my table salt is iodized!  Cool!

Stay Awesome!

Ryan

 

Study Strategies #1 – Flashcards

While we can charitably say I’ve been a student for a long time, it has only been relatively recently that I’ve started paying attention to pedagogy and effective study strategies.  Sure, while I was still an active student, I would be exposed to the usual litany of strategies for student success – read/review text multiple times, practice questions, low-level frequent studying is superior to cramming, etc.  But of course, most of these would get dropped because of my poor time management and I would end up cramming and staying up the night before a paper was due to write in one marathon stretch.  But those were my habits during undergrad and grad school and I haven’t been a student in almost five years.  I know I lack some of the youthful fortitude to carry-on those habits while working a full-time job, part-time job and all of the other fun projects I have on the go.

So, rather than working hard, I’m trying to work smart.  I’m trying to use sound pedagogical approaches to learning that helps me to effectively learn the material on my own and retain it for future application.  Right now, I’m taking a preparatory biology distance education course at the College I work for.  I took physics and chemistry through high school, but I did not think I would need the biology.  If I hope to make a career change towards paramedicine, this is a gate-keeper that I must pass.

Because of the nature of the biology course, most of what I’m dealing with is rote memorization that emphasizes knowing how systems fit together rather than directly applying knowledge.  This means that what I need to know to pass the test will focus more on being able to recite facts, definitions, explain processes and label diagrams.  Understanding and recognizing this is beneficial to how I can structure my homework.

One strategy I’m using for this course is flashcards.  There are two purposes to the flashcard:

  1. The act of creating the flashcard helps in retaining information.  To make useful flashcards, you have to sufficiently understand the material to condense it down into a few meaningful points.  Also, the physical act of writing the cards out helps you to retain the information (over and above just reading highlighted text from your book).
  2. Flashcard drills can reinforce knowledge depending on how you use them.  You can use keywords to trigger a recall of definitions, or use Jeopardy-style recall of knowing a definition to trigger the recall of a technical term.  You can chain cards linearly to help walk you through a multi-stage process (i.e. cellular division, or mitosis), or you can shuffle the cards and break your dependence on moving through memorized steps and sequences.

I found that the more time I spent in designing and creating flashcards, the better I memorized and understood processes.  Take, for instance, protein synthesis.  By copying a diagram from my textbook, I was able to learn:

  • the difference between transcription and translation;
  • the differences between mRNA, tRNA, and ribosomal RNA;
  • the process of how RNA encodes directions from DNA in the nucleus; and
  • how ribosomes outside of the nucleus create proteins.

All of that was memorized from one flashcard!

Everyone has different learning styles and unique ways of absorbing materials.  One way that is highly effective to me is brute force drills.  Once created, I use the flashcards to drill myself until the gaps start to fill in.  I first learned that brute force was effective for me in preparation for a probability course almost ten years ago.

After performing poorly on some quizzes and tests, I took the textbook and every practice question I could get my hands on, sat down in a Tim Horton’s and solved every question (sometimes multiple times!).  I kept solving them until I could instantly recognize which algorithm I needed based on the presented information and what I was asked to solve.  Those lessons I learned from probability theory almost ten years ago have helped me in my self-directed learning  today.

Flashcards are not the only tool you can use, but if you are looking to easily memorize concepts and schemas, they can be a highly effective strategy to help you out.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Have you ever used flashcards?  What did you use them for?  What strategies do you use to learn?  I’d be happy to read your input in the comments!