I have a friend aged 39 who will be taking professional accounting exam soon and after knowing that I write and share about how to learn better, he asked me to come up with a happy learning plan for him, and here it is.
In this article, I will break down and share:
(i) the goal of the happy learning plan
(ii) what you should know before we begin
(iii) having a study plan in 3 steps
(iv) the difference between knowing the information and memorising the information
(v) Bloom’s Taxonomy and going up the learning pyramid
(vi) the importance of sufficient rest to study and exam
(vii) what can you think about when you feel stressed?
The goal of the happy learning plan is threefold:
(a) study in my own time,
(b) sufficient rest,
© efficient learning
Setting the tone: before we begin you should know:
Being smart does not guarantee getting high marks.
And being successful does not mean you need to have a high IQ, successful people just know how to learn better.
Having a learning plan — mainly 3 steps :
(1) If you plan to study for the exam in the next 3 months or for a month, you need to have a curriculum and then break it down to how much you need to study each day.
(2) Monitor your progress each week
(3) If you are falling behind schedule, find out why — are you getting distracted? How to eliminate the distraction going forward?
A key difference: Know the information vs Memorise the information
Know the information means you have neurone created for the new knowledge piece. Each day our brain creates 7,000 new neurone when we gain new information.
Memorising the information means you have to store the information in the specific room in your brain palace — the memory zone. That requires more effort.
If it is an open book exam, you only need to know the information. With proper indexing, you can find the specific information easily when you need them.
If it is a closed book exam, you need to identify which information can be put in the “knowing” basket and which needs to be put in the “memory” basket.
For example, when I took my law exam, there are over a hundred cases in one exam. I could not possibly remember them all — the parties name, the year when the case was adjudicated, the facts of the case and the principles of the case.
Therefore, I only pick one key case for each legal principle to put into the memory basket and the rest is in the knowing basket.
And for that one key case, I don’t even remember it all — I only put the facts of the case and the principles of the case into the memory basket and the parties name, the year of adjudication is in the knowing basket.
This strategy would significantly reduce the memory pressure and focus your attention on what is really important for the purpose of exam.
Bloom’s Taxonomy
The Bloom’s Taxonomy — this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teaching.
It was elaborated by Bloom and consisted of six major categories: Remember, Understanding, Application, Analysis, Evaluate, and Create.
The higher it is, the better you learn.
As you can see from the graphics,
- Application is mid-level learning
- Writing would require analyse and that is also mid-level learning
- Analyse means studying the relationship of one knowledge point to another (i.e. learn like a kid — when you tell them one thing, they ask 10 follow up questions, when you answer one of the questions, they ask a further 10 questions.)
- Further,you may Create an index, Create a structure, Create an explanation, a course, a class to check and reinforce your understanding. More details in <How to Learn Faster with The Feynman Technique>
Sufficient rest
Our brain will tag the room (where we store our knowledge) in our big (brain) palace.
When we sleep, our brain is doing the tagging.
There is an experiment on learning how to play the piano:
Group A: consecutively play a melody for 30 minutes
Group B: play the same melody for 10 minutes, rest for 5 minutes, then play the same melody for 10 minutes
Which group play and memorise the melody better? Turns out to be Group B.
So having rest is essential to ensure sufficient time is given to the brain to do the tagging and organisation of information you put in.
Then the next question is: how to rest? how long do we need to rest?
The critical point is when you started to get distracted — that is when you need to rest.
***** Important: Don’t put your hand on your phone when you rest! In fact, simply having the phone on the desk is a distraction and would reduce our learning efficiency.
What you can do to rest:
- Close your eyes and meditate
- Or just sit there
- drink some water
- walk around
- look outside the window
When you feel stressed, here is the gum for you brain to chew on:
take your life as a storybook, what would you want this chapter to be about?
what would 10 years later self tell you?
finding your inner motivation by knowing the value of what you are doing, list out the benefits and value when you have already achieved your goal.
E.g. after passing the accounting exam, my friend would be qualified accountant and he will get at least 40% pay raise doing similar work as he is doing now. And it would be easier for him to find job in the future. Besides, his accounting knowledge can be used to analyse financial statements of companies that could help his investment decision.
After thinking about these benefits for a moment, the studying looks more appealing and he feels like he could study for another hour.
Although this maybe a quicker paced article, there are a lot of gems in it. Hope it is useful if you are about to take any exam or if you are looking to learn something intensively in the next month / few months.
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