A collection of useful advice from A Mind for Numbers:
Articulating your question is 80 percent of the battle. By the time you’ve figured out what’s confusing, you’re likely to have answered the question yourself.
It’s important to transform distant deadlines into daily ones
Planning your quitting time is as important as planning your working time
Writing appears to help you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are trying to learn
Memory tips: spaced repetiton + make use of visual and spatial memory systems as well + create meaningful groups + create stories
Transfer—apply what you’ve learned in new contexts
A last important trick is to reframe your focus. One student, for example, is able to get himself up at four thirty each weekday morning, not by thinking about how tired he is when he wakes but about how good breakfast will be.
One constant refrain I hear from students is that putting themselves in new surroundings—such as the quiet section of a library, which has few interrupting cues—works wonders with procrastination. Research has confirmed that a special place devoted just to working is particularly helpful
Being able to toggle your thinking—getting a glimpse of what you are learning before returning later to more fully understand what’s going on, is itself one of the main ideas in the book
In preparation for a test, have your problems and solutions neatly organized so you can go over them quickly. Some students tape handwritten solutions to problems on the relevant pages of their textbook so everything is readily available
Do “active” repetitions. Mentally review key problem steps in your mind while doing something active, such as walking to the library or exercising. You can also use spare minutes to review as you are waiting for a bus, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, or twiddling your thumbs until a professor arrives in the classroom. This type of active rehearsal helps strengthen your ability to recall key ideas when you are solving homework problems or taking a test.
The bottom line is that problem solving in any discipline often involves an exchange between the two fundamentally different modes (focused & diffused)
Multitasking is like constantly pulling up a plant. This kind of constant shifting of your attention means that new ideas and concepts have no chance to take root and flourish.
“Oh yeah, I see why they did that,” then the solution is not really yours—you’ve done almost nothing to knit the concepts into your underlying neurocircuitry. Merely glancing at the solution to a problem and thinking you truly know it yourself is one of the most common illusions of competence in learning
It was the anticipation that was painful. When the mathphobes actually did math, the pain disappeared. Procrastination expert Rita Emmett explains: “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.
The better you get at something, the more you’ll find you enjoy it.
This is a typical procrastination pattern. You think about something you don’t particularly like, and the pain centres of your brain light up. So you shift and narrow your focus of attention to something more enjoyable. This causes you to feel better, at least temporarily. […] Procrastination is like addiction. It offers temporary excitement and relief from boring reality. It’s easy to delude yourself that the most profitable use of any given moment is surfing the web for information instead of reading the textbook or doing the assigned problems.
When you procrastinate, you are leaving yourself only enough time to do superficial focused-mode learning. You are also increasing your stress level because you know you have to complete what feels like an unpleasant task. The resulting neural patterns will be faint and fragmented and will quickly disappear—you’ll be left with a shaky foundation.
There is a bottom-up chunking process where practice and repetition can help you both build and strengthen each chunk, so you can easily gain access to it when needed. And there is a top-down “big picture” process that allows you to see where what you are learning fits in. Both processes are vital in gaining mastery over the material. Context is where bottom-up and top-down learning meet. To clarify here—chunking may involve your learning how to use a certain problem-solving technique. Context means learning when to use that technique instead of some other technique
Recalling material when you are outside your usual place of study helps you strengthen your grasp of the material by viewing it from a different perspective
Continuing the study or practice after it is well understood is called overlearning. Overlearning can have its place—it can help produce an automaticity that is important when you are executing a serve in tennis or playing a perfect piano concerto.
Diffuse mode (also to be used as a reward after firm focused-mode work): workout, draw/paint, take a bath, shower, listen to music, play piano, pray, sleep, solitary walks, naps, conjugating verbs, cleaning, drive or ride the bus. The key is to do something else until your brain is consciously free of any thought of the problem.
As the days and weeks pass, it’s the distributed practice—the back and forth between focused-mode attention and diffuse-mode relaxation—that does the trick.
Consistency over time is key.
It takes time to move information from working memory to long-term memory. To help with this process, use a technique called spaced repetition
Chunks are pieces of information that are bound together through meaning. Once you chunk an idea or concept, you don’t need to remember all the little underlying details; you’ve got the main idea—the chunk—and that’s enough
Chunking: focus your attention on the information you want to chunk, understand the basic idea you are trying to chunk, close the book and test yourself, gain context, practice.
Skimming through a chapter or listening to a very well-organized lecture can allow you to gain a sense of the big picture.
Attempting to recall the material you are trying to learn—retrieval practice—is far more effective than simply rereading the material
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