How To Learn Stuff Version 1.

0 : 31 January 2017

How To Learn Stuff

Steve Smith
[email protected]

Contents

I The Theory 4
1 Introduction 4
1.1 You Can Sculpt Your Own Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2 A Sneak Preview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

2 The Learning Environment 5

3 Priming Your Mental Pump: Previewing 5

4 Teaching as Learning 5
4.1 Would You Study Harder to Get an A on a Test, or to Teach Material to the Class? . . . . . . 5
4.2 You Don’t Have to be a Teacher... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4.3 ...to Get Into Teach Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.4 Thinking About a Topic From Multiple Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

5 Learning Levels 7
5.1 What is the Difference Between Studying and Learning? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.2 The Learning Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.2.1 An Example: Pythagoras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.3 The Learning Levels Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5.3.1 Another Example: Goldilocks and the Three Bears . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5.4 At What Learning Level are You Operating? At What Level Do You Need to Operate? . . . 10
5.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

6 Focused and Diffuse Thinking 11

6.1 Concentration and Relaxation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
6.2 The Einstellung Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

7 Practising Recall When You Read 12

7.1 Using the Textbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

8 Regular, Spaced Repetition 12

9 Interleaving 13

10 Regular Testing 13

11 Procrastination is the Pride of Princes 14

11.1 The Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
11.2 The Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

12 Habits: Good and Not So Good 15

12.1 Top Ten Good Habits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
12.2 Top Ten Bad Habits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

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II The Practice 17
13 The Fundamental Unit of Work: the Sprint 17
13.1 The Basic Sprint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
13.2 The Advanced Sprint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
13.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

14 Working in Pairs or Groups 18

15 The Study Cycle 18

15.1 Previewing Material . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
15.2 Attending Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
15.3 Reviewing Material . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
15.4 Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
15.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

16 What to Do in a Sprint 20
16.1 How to Read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
16.1.1 Preparation 1 : Previewing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
16.1.2 Preparation 2 : Ask Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
16.1.3 Recalling and Paraphrasing... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
16.1.4 ...Actively . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
16.2 Teaching the Material . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
16.3 Solving Problems Without Using Examples as as Guide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
16.4 Creating Practice Exams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
16.5 Learning Stuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
16.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

17 Mistakes 24
17.1 Analysing Mistakes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
17.2 Taking Remedial Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
17.2.1 Doing One Thing at a Time in Algebra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
17.2.2 Limits on Integrals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

18 The Big Picture 26

A The Pythagorean Identity Revisited 27

A.1 Understanding... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

B Limits on Integrals 28

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Prerequisites
I help people learn Maths and Physics. This document is aimed primarily at my students, so that the
examples in it are from these subjects. To follow the examples, you will need to know
• Pythagoras’ Theorem;
• Very basic trigonometry;
• The essentials of integration.
If you don’t know any of this stuff, don’t worry. Just skip the examples!

Sources
This document is based on two main sources: one is a book by Saundra McGuire (McGuire (2015)); and
the other is a book (and associated Coursera course called “Learning How To Learn”) by Barbara Oakley
(Oakley (2014)). Quite a bit of my text is shameless copy-and-paste of sections of these books.
If you are at all interested in learning how to learn, get these books. You won’t regret it. There are so many
ideas in these books that I don’t cover here, because I want this to be a basic guide. So if you want to be
an expert learner - well, you know what to do!
Any mistakes in this document, however, will be mine.

Notes
I prefer to put little explanatory notes for things in footnotes1 so that they don’t distract from the current
moment, but you don’t have to go far to find them. I hope that’s OK with you.
The alternative is an endnote1 , but that disrupts the flow in my opinion. You can find endnotes at the end
of the document, just before the references.

Aims
There are two aims of this document.
First I want to introduce you to evidence for practices that improve learning that I have recently stumbled
upon. That’s the essence of “Part I”.
The second half of the document (cunningly called “Part II”) is devoted to answering the question: “So, how
can I use the theory to improve the way that I learn stuff?”. It shows you basic easy-to-master techniques
for acquiring knowledge, understanding, and applying it.
Techniques that you can apply to any course, on any subject, to do as well as you possibly can on the
course.

Document History
Date Version Comments
31 January 2017 1.0 The initial creation of the document.

1 This is a footnote.

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Part I
The Theory
1 Introduction
I’ve divided this document up into two parts because if you want to cut to the chase and get stuck into
finding out how you can learn much more betterly, skip straight to to Part II.
But I would advise you to read through the first part whenever you can. It’s an interesting read and you
will get a lot out of it, I promise! Part I gives the scientific evidence for the practises that I recommend in
Part II. So it’s kind of important.
But before you skip to Part II, finish reading the introduction!!

1.1 You Can Sculpt Your Own Brain

In the first part of this document I’m going to look at the evidence for and against different ways of
learning stuff.
And probably the most important thing to say first is that your brain can be changed by the thoughts you
have. You can sculpt your own brain, reshaping it to do whatever you want. When you use neural circuits
in your brain, you help to build the myelin sheath over them, as well as making many other microscopic
changes (Bengtsson et al. (2005)).
Practice appears to strengthen and reinforce connections between different brain regions, creating high-
ways between the brain’s control centers and the centers that store knowledge.
So...we can make significant changes in our brain by changing the way we think. And the more we think, the
better our brains become.

1.2 A Sneak Preview

Since one of the strategies you’re going to learn about that enhances the learning process is “previewing”,
I’m going to give you a little sneak preview of what theories we are going to cover. Here they are:
• You can change the way your brain is wired. Learning actually re-wires your brain. So it is possible
for you to make your brain work better!!
• Setting up an appropriate learning environment is very important.
• You learn better when you preview material before you study it.
• You learn something much more effectively by teaching it.
• There are different Learning Levels that you ascend as you develop and mature as a learner. Under-
standing these levels can help make you realise the kinds of things you will need to do to succeed
on any given course.
• Your brain has two main ways of thinking: these are known as focused and diffuse modes of thinking.
You need to allow your brain to work in both modes to learn something.
• When you read, you learn better if you practise recall as you read, and read actively.
• Regular, spaced repetition of something is better than one long intensive session.
• Interleaving is good: that’s when you don’t work on one thing for long periods, but switch between
different tasks.
• Learn how to tackle procrastination.
• Learn good habits, and get rid of bad ones.
So...if you’re ready, let’s go!!

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2 The Learning Environment

One of the first things to think about when you embark on a period of study is your study environment.
Are you planning to study on a train each day as you go to work? Do you have your own bedroom that
you can use? Will you play music as you study? This sort of thing.
Ideally, you need to be able to control your study environment. That is, you determine what the conditions
are like when you study. Sometimes that’s not going to be possible. If you are in a big family and you
share a bedroom, it might not always be possible to be able to study on your own. But you must do what
you can to control your environment.
And what should your learning environment be like? Here is a guide:
• You should work on your own (if at all possible).
• You should not have any music, radio, TV, etc., playing as you work. When you do your exam,
are you allowed to listen to music? No. Can you watch TV? No. If you always study listening to
Metallica at Volume 11, you might well find it impossible to function in the silence of the exam room.
• You should eliminate distractions as much as possible. That means: put your phone on silent, non-
vibration mode. Turn off the TV, radio, iPod, etc. Put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door. Yeah, I
know how addicted to your phone you are. But just wait: when we get to Part II, you will find that I
only want you to stop your phone distracting you for 40 minutes at a time. After that, you can text
away as much as you want until it’s time to work again. So it shouldn’t be too much of a hardship.

3 Priming Your Mental Pump: Previewing

As you first begin looking at a chapter or section of a book it helps to take a “picture walk” through the
chapter, glancing not only at the graphics, diagrams and photos, but also the section headings, summary
and even questions at the end of the chapter. This seems counter-intuitiuve - you haven’t actually read
the chapter yet - but it helps prime your mental pump. So you could do that now with this document:
have a look at all the pictures, and scan through the contents page. There aren’t any questions at the end,
unfortunately!
You’ll be surprised that how spending a minute or two glancing ahead before you read in depth will help
you organise your thoughts. You’re creating little neural hooks to hang your thoughts on, making it easier
to grasp the concepts.
There is more on previewing in Sections 15.1 and 16.1.1.

4 Teaching as Learning
4.1 Would You Study Harder to Get an A on a Test, or to Teach Material to the Class?
You might answer this question by saying things like
• “Well, I’d have to really know it if I have to teach it!”
• “If I’m going to teach it, I’d have to try and think of questions that I might be asked and make sure
that I can answer them. I don’t want to look stupid in front of the class.”
• “I want to make sure everyone understands and is prepared for the test, so I need to work out how
to explain the information in more than one way.”
So, have a think. Thus far, have you been working in make-an-A-on-the-test mode, or teach-the-material-to-
the-class mode?
Have you ever been trying to explain something you thought you understood to someone else, only to find
that in the middle of your explanation there was was something you didn’t grasp after all? I’m guessing
the answer is yes. If you hadn’t tried explaining the thing, you probably wouldn’t have realised that you
didn’t understand it until you got into the test.
So why not try explaining things as a means of learning it?

4.2 You Don’t Have to be a Teacher...

I’ve worked for quite a few years in the software industry, primarily developing the software that ran
military air-traffic radar control systems. As you might imagine, a lot of it was complicated stuff.

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Quite often, when I wrote a piece of code to implement an idea, the code didn’t work. So I’d change the
code and try again. It still wouldn’t work. Most of the time I’d get it running fairly quickly, but every so
often I just couldn’t get it running properly.
The company that I worked for had a small room with nothing in it but a table, a chair, and sitting on the
table, was a life-sized teddy bear. The idea was that when you got one of those difficult problems, what
you’d do was to prepare a talk and go and explain to the teddy bear what your problem was.
And guess what? Ninety-nine times out of ten, by simply verbalising an explanation of your problem to
the teddy bear, the solution would spring into your mind as you talked. It worked. Even though the teddy
bear couldn’t ask any questions.
Now I know that debugging code isn’t quite the same as trying to learn something, but there are a lot
of parallels. I was trying to teach my idea, and how I was implementing it, to the teddy bear. And as I
taught, I realised something. I learned.
You could do this. When you are trying to learn something, it’s a really good idea to get into teach-the-
material-to-the-class mode, and then practice by trying to teach the material to your teddy bear. Or your
dog. Or your younger sister. Or your parents.
Do you have those parents that keep getting on your back with “You’re not doing enough work”. “You
need to work harder”. “You spend too much time on your phone. Work harder!” Of course you do. Almost
everyone has. Imagine the situation then if you were begging them to let you explain the photo-electric effect,
completing the square, or pseudo-Reimannian manifolds to them every other day. I’ll bet that they soon
leave you alone.
So, getting your parents off your back probably justifies teaching as a means of learning all by itself. But
there’s a much better reason for doing it, of course. It really works as a way of learning stuff. I mean really
learning stuff.

4.3 ...to Get Into Teach Mode

From here on, I’m going to call this thinking-how-to-learn-by-teaching-it attitude, Teach Mode.

4.4 Thinking About a Topic From Multiple Perspectives

Students report that teaching as a means of learning also works because they anticipate the questions that
they might be asked. So they are looking at the topic from the point of view of the people they’re trying
to teach the stuff to. They are thinking about the possible confusions that might arise in their “students”
from their explanations, as well as trying to fill their own gaps in understanding.
You will find that the moment that you start developing a deeper understanding of your subject is the
moment when you start trying to teach it.

4.5 Summary

When you study, get into

Teach Mode

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5 Learning Levels
5.1 What is the Difference Between Studying and Learning?
Some answers you might expect from this question:

• “Studying is memorizing information for an exam; learning is when I understand and can apply it.”
• “Studying is short-term; learning is long-term.”
• “Studying is what I do the night before a test to make an A. Learning is what I do if I know that I’m
going to have to use that material later on.”

One student put it this way: “Studying is focusing on the ’whats’, but learning is focusing on the ’hows’,
’whys’ and ’what ifs’. If you focus on the ’whats’, and you forget them, you can’t recreate the information.
But if you focus on the ’hows’, ’whys’ and ’what ifs’, you can often work out what the ’whats’ are.
So you are starting to get the idea that there might be different levels of learning...

5.2 The Learning Levels

Although it is a gross simplification, Figure 1 shows a hierarchy of different learning levels2 .

Creating

Evaluating

Analysing

Applying

Understanding

Remembering

Figure 1: Learning Levels

The basic idea of this thing is that there is a difference between memorising something (Remembering),
understanding it well enough to put it into our own words (Understanding), knowing it well enough to be
able to apply it to different situations (Applying), etc, etc.

• If you are at Remembering, then you have memorised verbatim definitions, formulas, diagrams, etc.,
and you could not put the information into your own words.
• If you are at Understanding, then you can paraphrase the material. You could explain it to your teddy
bear, 8-year-old nephew or 80-year-old grandmother by creating analogies and examples that apply
to their lives.
• If you are at Applying, then you could use the information you have learned to solve problems that
you have never seen before. So if I asked you to give me a mini-lecture on the identity sin2 ( x ) +
cos2 ( x ) ≡ 1, you could talk to me about Pythagoras’ Theorem, how they are essentially the same
thing, and the other identities that are also equivalent to Pythagoras’ Theorem. And you could give
me examples of how you might use (apply) this equation to solve a problem. See Section 5.2.1.
• If you are at Analysing, you can take any concepts that you have learned and break them down into
its component concepts3 .
• If you are at Evaluating, you can look at two different processes, proposed by others, and determine
which is better for whatever reason (correct, desirable, efficient, ease of use).
2 Educational professionals know this as Bloom’s Taxonomy. The ideas for different learning levels were developed initially by

Bloom, et al, in 1956 (see Bloom et al. (1956)), and were later developed by Anderson et al in 2001 (see Anderson et al. (2001)) I
present here the later version, if you are interested!
3 See how the hierarchy thing builds up? If you are at a particular level, then you can use and explain all the levels below.

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• If you are at Creating, you can come up with your own ideas about how to solve different kinds of
problems that no-one has ever told you about. Or you might come up with a different process for
doing something. A different way to do something that makes the task so much easier4 .

At what level do you think you have to be at to be in Teach Mode?

5.2.1 An Example: Pythagoras

For example, if you are trying to learn the following trigonometrical identity:

sin2 ( x ) + cos2 ( x ) ≡ 1 (1)

you could just learn the equation and hope you remember it when it comes to exam time. If this was your
plan, then you would be at Remembering. But if you have a memory like mine, you are flirting with disaster
adopting that strategy.
Instead, how about learning this picture: I don’t know about you, but I find learning pictures easier than

1
sin( x )

x
cos( x )

Figure 2: My Replacement for SOH CAH TOA!

learning words and equations. Now if you know this picture, then you can work out what the equation is
that you need to learn. Let’s see how we can do this. If you know Pythagoras’ Theorem, and our picture is
of a right-angled triangle, then you can apply the theorem to this particular triangle. That gives you the
equation:

sin2 ( x ) + cos2 ( x ) ≡ 1

directly!
But if you understand that Equation (1) is completely equivalent to Pythagoras’ Theorem5 , then you are
certainly at least at Understanding. If you couldn’t remember the identity, you could work out what the
identity is from Figure 2. The picture is what you really need to remember.
So there’s a difference between trying to remember facts, and understanding where those facts come from,
and how they fit in to the grand scheme of things. Interesting.
And of course there’s absolutely no point in remembering identities if you don’t know what to do with
them...
If you are interested, there’s a more in-depth look at this example in Appendix A.

4 See,
for example, Smith (2012)
5 Barbara Oakley calls this linking of ideas from one topic area to another in a subject (or even from one subject to another)
“chunking”. Learning a subject is all about making as many chunks as you can!

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5.3 The Learning Levels Revisited

Here are the learning levels again, but with a bit of explanation of each level, together with keywords that
are often associated with the different levels.

Produce new or original work

Creating
design, assemble, construct, develop, investigate

Justify a position or decision

Evaluating
appraise, argue, defend, judge, select, value

Draw connections among ideas

Analysing
differentiate, organise, compare, contrast, distinguish, question, test

Use information in new situations

Applying
execute, implement, solve, demonstrate

Explain ideas and concepts

Understanding
describe, explain, identify, recognise

Recall facts and basic concepts

Remembering
define, duplicate, list, memorise, repeat, state

Figure 3: Learning Levels Explained

Do I need to state that the further up the hierarchy you are, the better?

5.3.1 Another Example: Goldilocks and the Three Bears

One way to get a grasp of the ideas involved in this hierarchy of learning levels, is to apply it to something
very familiar.
Do you know the story of Goldilocks and the three bears? If not, go and read it now. The following is how
the levels of learning can be applied to this story. Perhaps an interesting thing to do before you continue,
would be to think for a few minutes about how you think the learning levels could be applied to this story.
Once you’ve had a go, read on, and compare your thoughts with mine.

Remembering You have mastered Remembering when you can recall all of the things that Goldilocks used
at the bears’ home.

Understanding If you can give a reason why Goldilocks preferred Baby Bear’s chair, bed, or porridge,
then you have mastered Understanding.

Applying If you can reasonably predict what items Goldilocks would use when visiting another home,
then you have reached the level of Applying.

Analysing You have mastered Analysing if you can think critically about the context of the story and
call into question particular assumptions; for example: is it plausible that bears could eat porridge out of
bowls?

Evaluating If you can give reasons why Goldilocks’s behaviour could be considered justifiable by some
and unconscionable by others, then you have mastered Evaluating.

Creating And you can demonstrate that you have scaled the entire hierarchy and mastered Creating if
you can write your own story starring a character called Goldilocks but featuring very different themes
and values. “Goldilocks and the Three Vegans”, perhaps.

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5.4 At What Learning Level are You Operating? At What Level Do You Need to
Operate?
Here are some more questions:
• At what learning level do you think you need to be at in order to get great results at GCSE?
• At what learning level do you think you need to be at in order to get great results at A-Level?
• At what learning level do you think you need to be at in order to get great results at university?

It is my view that in order to get pretty good results in a range of GCSE subjects, you only need to be
at the Remembering level. That might sound a bit controversial, and yes, it will vary from one subject to
another, but in general, I don’t think that you have to be very high up the pyramid to be praised by society
as being clever at age 16.
However, when you start your A-level courses, there seems to be a massive jump in difficulty from GCSE.
This step-up is particularly marked in subjects like Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. But it is true for
other subjects too. Not only is the material harder, but the questions are much harder, and you seem to be
going through the material much quicker than before.
So what’s the difference between GCSE and A-Level in subjects like Mathematics, Physics and Chem-
istry? Well, could it be that in order to do well at A-level, it is expected (by exam boards, examiners, and
consequently teachers) that students need to be working at higher learning levels than was necessary for
GCSE?
Suddenly, learning strategies that worked fine at GCSE level (don’t do any work, cram the night before to
remember everything you need for the exam, etc., etc.) aren’t getting very good results any more. It used
to hit a lot of people as soon as they took their first AS exam in the January of Year 126 . But at the time
of writing there aren’t any exams in the January of the AS year any more, the realisation that the sort of
work you are doing isn’t sufficient for A-level might not hit you until it’s too late.
In my view, students need to be at least at the Applying learning level at A-level. And I think that it’s that
two-step jump in learning level that causes people grief when they make the transition from GCSEs to
A-levels. At A-level, much more is expected of you.
So I guess the next question is: if you’re at the Remembering level, how do you get up to the Understanding
and Applying levels? And beyond? Well, that’s for later. For now, just appreciate that what ever course
you do, you have to work at the appropriate learning level.

5.5 Summary

Whatever course you do,

you have to work at the appropriate
Learning Level

6 When such things existed. And presumably again soon, when January AS exams return, when the Minister for Education

changes his mind again.

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6 Focused and Diffuse Thinking

6.1 Concentration and Relaxation
Since the very beginning of the twentieth century, neuroscientists have been making profound advances in
understanding the two different types of networks that the brain switches between - highly attentive state
networks, and more relaxed resting state networks7 .
Here, the thinking processes involved in these two different types of networks are going to be called focused
mode, and diffuse mode, respectively.
The reason I’m mentioning them is that both focused mode and diffuse mode are highly important for learning.
See Immordino-Yang et al. (2012).
It seems that you frequently switch back and forth between these two modes in your day-to-day activities.
You’re either in one mode or the other - not consciously in both at the same time.
But get this: the diffuse mode does seem to be able to work quietly in the background on something you are not
actively focusing on.
Focused mode thinking is essential for studying mathematics and science. It involves a direct approach to
solving problems using rational, sequential, analytical approaches. Turn your attention to something, and
bam: the focused mode is on, like the tight penetrating beam of a searchlight.
Diffuse mode thinking is also essential when studying mathematics and science. It allows you to suddenly
gain an insight on a problem you’ve been struggling with. It is also associated with “big-picture” perspec-
tives. Diffuse mode thinking is what happens when you relax your attention and let your mind wander.
The relaxation allows different parts of your brain to hook up and deliver valuable insights on a problem.
So when you study difficult subjects, you have to let your brain work in both focused and diffuse modes
to get the best out of it.
Focused mode thinking takes much more mental effort than diffuse mode thinking. So by regular switch-
ing from focused to diffuse thinking, you are also giving your brain a rest!!

6.2 The Einstellung Effect

Another issue about studying difficult subjects is the Einstellung Effect. This is where you get stuck in a
mental groove. You get one idea stuck in your head about how to solve this problem, and keeping focused
on that one thought prevents a better thought from surfacing (see Bilalić et al. (2008)).
This kind of thing happens a lot in mathematics and science because sometimes your initial intuition about
what’s happening is misleading. You have to unlearn something in order to learn it properly.
The Einstellung effect is a frequent stumbling block for students. It’s not just that sometimes your natural
inuitions need to be restrained, it’s that sometimes it is rough even figuring out where to begin, as when
tackling a homework problem. You bumble about, your thoughts far from the actual solution, because the
deep groove of the focused mode prevents you from springing to a new place where the solution might be
found. Notice: the Einstellung effect only occurs in focused mode.
So...if you are trying to understand or figure out something new, your best bet is to turn off your precision-
focused thinking and turn on your “big picture” diffuse mode, long enough to be able to latch on to a new,
more fruitful approach.8
7 See Mangan (1993), Cook (2002), Raichle and Snyder (2007), Takeuchi et al. (2011), Andrews-Hanna (2012), Moussa et al. (2012),

for example.
8 The best idea I’ve ever had in my life came to me when I was in diffuse mode. In fact, I was asleep. I was trying to solve a

particularly difficult problem while working on a military air-traffic control system. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that
the customer kept changing the requirements. Four of us had been working on this problem for about six months. And the software
was getting more and more complex, larger and larger, as each requirement change came in. And because when each change was
received we had to re-write large chunks of code, then we were continually having to re-test the system to make sure all the previous
requirements (that we’d already tested lots of times) were still satisfied.
This one magnificent night, the solution came to me in a dream. It was astonishing in its simplicity: I could replace all the original
code by only a few lines of code and a small database of rules. The following weekend I spent the whole of Saturday and Sunday stripping
out the original code (that took two days) and replacing it by my new solution (that took about 20 minutes). And it worked. And
the real beauty of the new solution: when a new requirement came in, the code did not have to change: I just changed the rules in the
database! And testing: because the code didn’t change, we only had to test for the changes to the rules.

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7 Practising Recall When You Read

7.1 Using the Textbook
Increasingly often I am coming across students who haven’t been given a textbook when they start a
course. Whatever the reason, financial constraints on the school, the teacher not believing it necessary,
whatever, it is necessary. It is vital. And there are many reasons for this. Such as...
• How can you preview material before a class if you don’t have anything to look at?
• The textbook will say the same thing, but in a different way, to the teacher. That’s good. If the teacher
says something that you don’t understand, then maybe getting someone else (the author of the book)
to go through the same ideas in a different way will make it clear. Or clearer. So ideally you want
several textbooks. For any given idea, one of them surely will be able to explain it in a way that you
can understand.
• There will be lots of examples for you to work through.
• There will be lots of questions to test your knowledge and skills.
• However good the teacher, their notes will be insufficient. They know the material inside out (hope-
fully), but when they teach something, they miss lots of things out that are obvious to them, but not
to the students. It is impossible to avoid this. I do it myself. It still happens in books, of course,
but it’s much worse for someone standing in front of a class because of the pressure of time to get
through the stuff, and the way the teacher is going through the material is perfectly logical to him.
So to fill in the gaps, students need extra sources of material to use to perfect the notes they take9 . If
they don’t, they’ll fill in the gaps themselves...with potentially dire consequences...
And another thing: know how to use a textbook! I encounter the following scenario with students all the
time. We’re sitting together. We’re going through a question that has the word “power” (or whatever) in
it. I ask: “What is power?”. Blank look. “How can you find out what power is?” Blank look. I stare down
at the textbook. No reaction. “Could it be defined in your textbook?” The student starts looking though
the book by seemingly flicking through pages randomly. They don’t know that there is a “Contents” page,
or how to use the “Index”!!

8 Regular, Spaced Repetition

Research has shown that if you try to glue things into your memory by repeating something twenty times
in one evening, for example, it won’t stick nearly as well as it will if you practice it the same number of
times over several days or weeks (Baddleley et al. (2009), Carpenter et al. (2012)).
Flash Cards are really good for this. Say you want to remember the definition of, symbol for, and units
of the physics concept of Power. You could take an index card and write (writing seems to help you more
deeply encode information, so making your own flash cards is a really good idea)

Power

on one side, and

Energy
Power =
Time
E
or P =
t
(The units of power are Js−1 , or Watts W)

So, you look at the side with the Power on it, and see if you can remember what’s written on the other side.
If you can’t, flip it over and remind yourself of what you are supposed to know. And when you do this,
read the information out loud. If you can remember what you need to know about Power, put the card aside.
9 When I was at university and it came to start revising for the final exams, I looked at my notes and I couldn’t make any sense of

them. I’d obviously missed lots of things out during the lectures because I couldn’t write fast enough (and because they weren’t in
the lecture!). Panic set in. How can I revise if I can’t understand my own notes? So I borrowed other peoples’ notes. They’d missed
stuff out too, but once I’d borrowed several sets of notes, I was able to piece together what happened in the lecture, and supplement
my notes so that I could read them, understand them and revise from them. It is only when you understand something can you
revise it. And I had to do this for all the exams I was sitting. It took a while. But it was certainly not wasted time, however, because
the action of trying to understand and supplement my notes gave me a great start in learning it. In fact, by the time I had struggled
through this process of supplementing my notes to a point that I could understand them, I was pretty ready for the exams.

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Then go and do something else for a while. How long that while is could vary from minutes to days,
depending on how well you recalled the information about power. The better you remember the stuff, the
longer you should leave it. And then test yourself again on the Power card.
You will build up a stash of lots of cards. You could group them by subject and topic. Then, one of
the ways of learning about C1 Coordinate Geometry would be to take out your C1 Coordinate Geometry
cards, shuffle them, and test yourself on twenty of them. Those that you could remember, put to one side.
Those that you couldn’t, put back into the remainder of the twenty cards and shuffle them again. That
way that card will come up again soon. Continue this until you can remember all the cards.
By increasing your spacing between sessions using the C1 Coordinate Geometry cards, you will become
more certain of mastery: you will lock the information firmly into place. See, for example, Dunlosky et al.
(2013) and Roediger and Pyc (2012).
There are well-designed electronic flash card systems, such as Anki that have built into them the ap-
propriate spaced repetition time to optimise the rate of learning new material. You should check Anki
out. I intend to try and produce my own flash cards for A-level Maths and Physics in Anki as soon as
procrastination allows.
If you have different decks, one for each subject topic, then you could practice with the C1 Coordinate Ge-
ometry cards, then practice with the Unit 1 Electricity cards, then go back to the C1 Coordinate Geometry
cards. That would be an example of...

9 Interleaving
Interleaving is doing a mixture of different types of activity as you study.
For example, don’t spend the whole night studying nuclear physics. Split up your study periods (see
Section 13) so that you study nuclear physics for a while, then switch to integration by substitution. After
that, you could go back to nuclear physics again.
So you are just mixing up different topics in one study session, like the layers in a sandwich.
Or you could interleave when you spend one study period doing your differentiation homework. Let’s say
that you had been tasked with doing six problems from Exercise 7C from your textbook. After doing two
of the questions, go and do a question from Exercise 7B. Then do two more of the questions from your
homework. Then do a question from Exercise 7A. Finally finish off doing the last two questions from your
homework.
Why? Research has shown (Rohrer and Pashler (2007)) that it can be a waste of valuable learning time
spending all your time on one activity. Once you have grasped an idea, overlearning it (continuing practice
when something is understood) does not reap any additional benefits.
Instead, if you switch your brain to think about something else for a while, and then come back to your
original work, then you will start to learn about when to apply a particular technique, as well as how to
apply it. Because you know that Exercise 7C is testing your ability to differentiate using the chain rule,
you know that you need to apply the chain rule to every question. But by looking at other differentiation
questions for a while, then coming back to Exercise 7C you will be learning under what circumstances it
will be necessary to use the chain rule.
And that’s really important for the exam, because they don’t ask you questions like “Differentiate ... using
the chain rule”. They ask questions like “Differentiate ...”. They don’t tell you which technique to use. It’s
up to you to learn when a technique should be used, as well as how to use it.
Interleaving helps you do just that.

10 Regular Testing
There is powerful evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of testing as a way to reinforce, deepen and
enrich learning. In articles for the New York Times, science writer Benedict Carey (Carey (2010), and Carey
(2014)) shares evidence from Roediger and Karpicke (2006) and Pennebaker et al. (2013) that illustrates the
power of testing.

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Practice testing works. If you want to do well on a test or on an exam, you need to practice first. It may
be obvious to you that if you want to study to take an actual exam, then you need to do some past exam
papers as practice. But for the same reason, it’s good to practice for tests!

11 Procrastination is the Pride of Princes

As my school Latin teacher used to say.

11.1 The Problem

This is the last section of this document that I wrote. Perhaps I’ve been putting it off.
Procrastination is one of the biggest problems that students today have to face. “Before I start my home-
work, I’ll just check Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and email...” Two hours have gone. And even
after homework has started, the ping of the arrival of a new text provokes the instinctive reaction to stop
what you are doing and check the text. As if it is the most important thing in the world.
As a student in the modern world, you must develop strategies to prevent distractions and procrastination.
So how do you do that? Well, you can start by trying to understand how procrastination works. And the
first thing to understand is that we procrastinate about things that make us feel uncomfortable (Ainslie
and Haslam (1992), Steel (2007)). If you are a mathphobe, you can actually feel pain by thinking about
doing mathematics (Lyons and Beilock (2012)).
But get this: it’s the anticipation that’s painful. When the mathphobes actually did the mathematics, the pain
went away. The dread of doing a task takes up more time and energy than actually doing the task.
Now I’m all for avoiding pain. But the pain is in the dread, not in the task! If we let the dread win, so
that we avoid doing the task, then that’s great in the short term, but it’s disastrous in the long-term. It’s
like taking small amounts of poison every day. In the short-term it’s not so bad, but there may not be a
long-term...
Procrastination is like an addiction. And it works like other addictions: it works on cues. You have a maths
problem to solve. Ping. You lapse into your comfortable procrastination response: read the text. Feels
good. You really should get down to that essay. Ping...

11.2 The Solution

Barbara Oakley calls bad habits “zombies”. And when you have fallen into a bad habit, you are in “zombie
mode”. So...how do you prevent yourself from getting into zombie mode?
To understand how, we need to look a bit deeper into zombies. Here’s how they work:

• The Cue: this is the trigger that launches you into zombie mode. The ping of a text arrival, for
example.
• The Response: this is your zombie mode. It’s what you do following the cue. Read the text,
obviously.
• The Reward: Habits reward us by giving us small dollops of pleasure. Procrastination is an easy
habit to develop because the reward (moving your mind to something more pleasant) happens so
quickly. But good habits can also be rewarded. Findings ways to reward good study habits is vital
to escaping procrastination.
• The Belief: habits have power because of your belief in them. For example, you might feel that you’ll
never be able to change your habit of leaving things until the last moment. To change the habit, you’ll
need to change your underlying belief.

The trick to changing your behaviour is to look at your reaction to a cue. The only place you need to apply
willpower is to change your reaction to the cue.
So the secret to eliminating procrastination is to:
• The Cue: Look for the cues in your life. You need to identify as many of these as you can!
• The Response: Prevent the cues from affecting you. If you are a slave to your phone, then when you
want to study, turn it off. “Whoa! Turn off my phone? No way, man!” But...as you will see in Part II,
you will only need to do this for a short amount of time.

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• The Reward: Reward yourself for the work you do. If you like films, well, watch one. The thing is
to develop a routine that includes rewards. And you will find that a feeling of accomplishment for
completing a task is quite often its own reward. Coffee. Texting. Web surfing. Start to think of these
things as rewards for activity.
• The Belief: Start believing that your new system will work (it will!) and that it will see you safely
through your exams (it will do that too!). A powerful tool here is mental contrasting: compare where
you are now with where you want to be. Because of this system, you will achieve what you want to achieve!
And you can start putting this into practise by focusing on process rather than product. That means con-
centrating initially on just getting into the routine, without worrying too much about what you actually
accomplish in your routine.
In Part II we will discover that the best way to work is to do little bits of work, separated by breaks. I call
this little bit of work (with no distractions) followed by a break a sprint. So when you start working in
sprints, just work. Don’t get hung up on what you are achieving. Achievement will come. Just get into
the new routine of a bit of work, followed by a reward. Bit of work followed by a reward.
Barbara Oakley devotes a lot of her book to tackling procrastination. After reading this document, and
you still have procrastination issues, then I would strongly advise you to get her book, and look at the ideas
that she and a lot of her students have come up with for getting to grips with this pernicious devil.

12 Habits: Good and Not So Good

This is a kind of summary of the whole of Part I.

12.1 Top Ten Good Habits

Use recall After you read a paragraph, look away, and recall the main ideas. Don’t highlight. Try recalling
ideas as you walk to the bus stop, or when you are in a different room from the one where you originally
learned the stuff. The ability to recall is one of the key indicators of good learning.

Test yourself On everything. All the time. Flash cards are your friend.

Get into Teach Mode Learn things as if you had to give a presentation on Friday. In fact, why don’t you
give a presentation on Friday? You could give it to your Mum, or the dog.

Space your repetition Spread out your learning of a given topic and do a little every day.

Do a mixture of activities as you practice Never spend too long doing one particular kind of thing, such
as solving problems, using flash cards, reading, writing a report. Mix it up and work on different kinds of
activities. Do a little of each.

Alternate different problem-solving techniques as you practice Even when you are doing homework
questions, mix up the kind of questions you are doing, so that you learn when to use a technique as well
as how to use a technique.

Take breaks If you get stuck on something, take a break. Do something else for a bit. Come back to it
later, and quite often you get a different insight into your problem.

Get into focused mode When you study, split your study time into short lumps of time when you can
fully concentrate on something. Eliminate distractions during this time. Then...take a break.

Eat your frogs first Start working on the hardest things first. If you get stuck, switch to something else.
Then come back to the hard stuff, ..., switch, ...

Make a mental contrast Imagine where you have come from, and constrast that with where your studies
will take you. Remember your dream!

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12.2 Top Ten Bad Habits

Waiting until the last minute to study If you were preparing to run a marathon, would you only start
training sessions the night before? Procrastination is the single, monumentally important, keystone bad
habit.

Reading passively Sitting passively, and letting your eyes run over the page. Unless you can prove that
you can recall the information in the book, reading is a complete waste of time.

Highlighting This is a really good technique to fool yourself into thinking that you know something.
But actually, all you’re doing is moving your hand.

Glancing at a problem solution and thinking you know how to do it This is one of the worst errors
students make when they study. You need to be able to solve a problem step by step, without the solution
in front of you.

Repeatedly solving problems of the same type that you already know how to solve If you were a
footballer, and you’re really good at heading, would you prepare for the final this coming Saturday by
only practising your heading?

Letting study sessions with friends turn into chat sessions If you work in groups occasionally (a very
good thing!), then make sure that the members of the group focus on the work before enjoying the fun.

Neglecting to use the textbook before you start working on problems Would you dive into a pool
before you learn how to swim?10

Not clearing up things you don’t understand There are many ways of doing this: your teachers, tutors,
peers, books, YouTube, the internet in general...

Thinking that you can learn deeply while you are being constantly distracted Every tiny pull toward
a text, an email, a conversation means that you have less brain power to devote to learning. So it won’t
happen as well as it could.

Not getting enough sleep Your brain pieces together problem-solving techniques while you sleep. It also
practices and repeats whatever you put in mind just prior to falling asleep. Prolonged fatigue builds up
toxins in the brain that get washed away during sleep. If you don’t get a good night’s sleep before a test,
nothing else you have done to prepare for the test will matter.

10 Actually, I did once. Well, the equivalent, anyway. Nearly drowned. Seriously.

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Part II
The Practice
So...how do you go about putting all this theory into practice? You use the strategies that are presented in
this section. And they fall into three main categories:
• The “Sprint”,
• The “Study Cycle”,
• Preparing for tests and exams.
Preparing for tests and exams seems a pretty obvious thing you might want to do on a course. And you’re
right. I’ve covered the topics of revision and exam technique in another document (Smith (2015)).
But what is a “sprint”, and what’s the “Study Cycle”, then? Aha! I’m glad you asked!

13 The Fundamental Unit of Work: the Sprint

When you are working on some aspect of your course, reading the textbook, answering homework ques-
tions, etc., then you can either work on your own, or with others. Working in groups is dealt with later.
For now, let’s think about the way that you work most of the time: alone.
I want to describe here the main way that you will work on your own. Since all big jobs can be broken
down into smaller pieces, and those smaller pieces can be broken down into even smaller pieces, etc. etc.,
I want to introduce you to the fundamental unit of your work: I call it the Sprint11 .

13.1 The Basic Sprint

What you do is to break up all your work on a task into sprints. Each sprint can be as short as 20 minutes,
or as long as 90 minutes, but I recommend that you start out using 60 minutes as a guide. And this is
what you will be doing in those 60 minutes:
• Do an active learning task (≈ 40 minutes). I’ll talk more about precisely what you do in these 40
minutes later!
• Take a break! (≈ 20 minutes). Do anything you want. Go for a walk. Call one of your friends. Watch
TV. Use social media. Anything you want. This part of the process is vital! It restores energy and
motivation, gives you a reward, and allows what you have been doing for the last 40 minutes to “sink
in”12 .
Once one sprint is complete, you can start another one. And another.
Sprints use the theory of focused and diffuse thinking patterns (Section 6). During the ≈ 40 minutes of
activity, you will be in focused thinking mode. During the ≈ 20 minutes of break, you will be in diffuse
thinking mode. Both modes are essential for your brain to assimilate and process new information, and to
practice tasks.
If you are new to these ideas, start organising your work into basic sprints from now. Later, when you get
more experienced, come back and read the next section on more advanced sprinting!
So when you are working on your own, split your time into sessions of approximately an hour each. And
remember: in that hour, you’re only working for about two-thirds of the time.

13.2 The Advanced Sprint

When you get really good at doing sprints, you can add a couple of extra bits.
In an advanced sprint, each sprint can be as long as works best for you. For me, I like making my sprints
an hour long. And this is what you will be doing in your advanced sprint:
• Set specific goals for the session (≈ 2 minutes).
11 This is my name. McGuire calls them “Intense Study Sessions”. I don’t like the sound of “intense”. It smacks of hard work! And
they are not really intense. Intense really just means what you do when you are concentrating on something. I’ve borrowed the name
sprint from modern software development practices. I like it because the name gives you the essence of the thing: a brief spurt of
activity followed by a period of rest!
12 To see just how important this break is, see, for example, Howard (2006).

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• Do an active learning task (≈ 40 mins).

• Take a break (≈ 20 mins).
• After the break, review the session (≈ 5 mins). During this time you should assess how well you
learned the material. If you’ve identified things that you don’t understand, write them down.
Setting goals focuses the mind as to what you are trying to achieve in this sprint. It raises questions that
you want to try and answer during the sprint.
Doing an assessment allows you to think about how you can make your learning practices better in the
future.

13.3 Summary

When you are working on your

own, split up your effort into
Sprints

14 Working in Pairs or Groups

Working in pairs or groups can be a powerful supplement to other learning strategies.
In groups, you will have the chance to teach. You also get the opportunity to accurately judge your own
learning as compared to your peers. See Cook et al. (2013) for more details. Cook found evidence that in
groups you are much more likely to experience and assess how other people think, and consequently you
will think more about how you yourself think. And this has great benefits.
Obviously, to be effective, group work should be more than just socialising. To get around this problem,
you could look at, for example, the “Study Group Starter Kit” produced by the Center for Academic
Success at Louisiana State University (where Saundra McGuire works). Although this kit is somewhat
over the top, it does try and implement ideas from such research as Vygotsky (1980) and Bruner (1985),
which essentially say that when doing group work, focus on the work first, and while working, it’s best to
do both discussion and problem-solving activities. Pretty obvious, really.

15 The Study Cycle

The study cycle is the daily routine that you get into when you take a course. This is what will happen
most of the time. It’s the old familiar go-to-classes, do-the-homework sort of thing.
But of course, we are trying to improve the way that we think about how we learn. And there are things
that we can do to improve this daily routine. You may have never given any thought to how we can
improve the process of assimilating material. Experts have. One thing they have come up with to help
is the “study cycle”. So, to get the most out of going to classes, you should ideally do the following five
things as part of your daily routine:
• Previewing material before it is taught to you
• Go to classes
• Review the material
• Work on the material
• Assess your learning
And in the next few sub-sections, we will talk a bit more about each of these things. Except that is, for
“work on the material”, which is covered in Section 16.

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15.1 Previewing Material

This step is all about previewing material before you come across it in class.
For this to be possible, you will obviously need to know what you will be doing in forthcoming classes.
That will be relatively easy at university, where course timetables often detail lecture contents13 , but at
A-level, it might not be so clear what will be taught in next week’s lessons. So what do you think the
answer to that problem might be? How about get your teacher to tell you what each of the next few lessons will
be about. This ought to be a regular feature of each week’s timetable.
So, let’s assume that you know what Wednesday’s Maths lesson will be about. It’s going to be about
solving quadratic equations. Now what?
There should be a textbook that is being used to support your course. If you haven’t got your own personal
copy of it, get one. Once you know that Wednesday’s Maths class will be on solving quadratic equations,
you can look up the relevant section(s) in the textbook, and skim through them. Rocket science.
How long do you need to spend doing this? Obviously that will depend. But it could be as little as
10 minutes14 . If you’re new to previewing, I should start by allocating longer than that, and I would
recommend spending longer than that, but if you are pushed for time, just do what you can. But do it. For
every class!!
So what exactly are you trying to achieve by previewing the material? Well, the idea is described fully in
Section 16.1.1 where it is applied to reading material. But you do the same thing when you are previewing
material before class as you would when you are previewing material you are about to read carefully.

15.2 Attending Classes

Again, this is more appropriate to university students than to A-level students, but the simple idea is clear:
go to all your classes. Or at least, as many as your health and other extraneous circumstances allow.
If you’ve previewed the material for a class, there are several advantages when it comes to attending the
class. As you have already skimmed through the material,
• class time will be a bit like revision;
• there will be things that you don’t understand. In that case you can write down questions. Questions
that you can then ask in the class.
And when you are in class, take notes, by hand. There is research (see, for example, Mueller and Oppen-
heimer (2014)) that indicates that taking notes by hand has greater learning benefits than taking notes
electronically. Reasons for this include:

• Paraphrasing is better for learning than transcribing text verbatim. Mark Twain is often credited with
this famous quote: “College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’
lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.” We must guard against this. If you think
about what you are writing as you write it, learning may well occur! If not, ...
• What software tools do you use to take notes? What do you do if there is an important graph to
copy? Or some other important and complex picture? Or a table? Mathematical equations?
If you miss a class, borrow someone else’s notes (or the notes from more than one someone!) and create
your own notes for the class.

15.3 Reviewing Material

As soon as possible after class, you should review the material from the class, and explain it to yourself
(and others - see Section 4.2). This review helps to clarify and solidify the ideas from the class. And
remember to be in Teach Mode when you do this.
Have you ever watched a film more than once? Of course you have. Have you ever found things from the
second (and subsequent) viewings that you missed the first time? Of course you have. So the power of
reviewing material is clear then.
If there are gaps in your notes, fill them as soon as possible!
13 Not always, of course...
14 Which could be the 10 minutes immediately prior to the start of the class, if you get there early!

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15.4 Assessment
By engaging in self-evaluation, you can see how well your learning is progressing. Maybe you were trying
flash cards this study session. Did they work? Maybe concept mapping would have been better? Are you
having serious trouble understanding a certain topic? If so, you have identified that you need help. Get it!!

15.5 Summary
For each class of the course...

Preview the Material

Have a quick peek at

what you will be doing
On to the in the next class
next class...

Assess your Learning

Attend the Class
How did that work ses-
sion go? Is there any- Taking hand written
thing that can be done notes, of course
to make it work better?

Do Some Work in Teach Review the Material in

Mode Teach Mode

Which will either be On Filling in as many gaps

your own in a number in your understanding
of sprints, or In a group as possible, in sprints

Figure 4: The Study Cycle

16 What to Do in a Sprint
Hang on. You’ve talked about sprints in Section 13. Why didn’t you put this stuff in that section?
I’m interleaving! Cunning, eh?
So...what do you do when you are in the “active learning task” bit of a sprint, all by your own self? Well,
I’ll tell you. You can do one of these things:

• you can read something, or

• teach something to someone else, or
• solve problems (from homework or past papers, say), or
• create your own practice exams, or
• remember stuff using flash cards.

That’s it.
Let’s cover each of these in turn.

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The thing you will probably do most often in a sprint is read stuff. If you can’t read, learning is much
harder. So I’m going to tell you how to read. “What?”, I hear you cry, “I know how to read!!”. Do you,
indeed...

16.1 How to Read

What happens when you read? If you’re like most people, you begin to read, and all is well until your
mind starts to wander. But your brain doesn’t immediately realise that it’s not paying attention to what
you’re reading because your eyes are still tracking the text. It’s not until you get further down the page
that you realise “Oh, I stopped paying attention ages ago, and have no idea what I’m reading about”.
At this point, what do you usually do? If you’re like most people, you’ll go back to the beginning, and
start again. But this time, of course, you’re determined to concentrate harder to stop yourself from coming
off the rails. And...you get a bit further before you realise you are thinking about dinner as your eyes skim
over the words.
And then what do you do? Start again...15
So just reading the thing, passively, isn’t going to work very well. So what can we do instead? Obviously
we have to be more active when we read. What does that mean? How can we read actively?

16.1.1 Preparation 1 : Previewing

[The same ideas described here apply to previewing material before going to a class. See Section 15.1.]
The first thing to do is to give yourself a preview of what you’re about to read16 . The brain is much better
at learning when it has a big picture, and then fills in the details. See, for example, Klingner and Vaughn
(1999). How do you give yourself that big picture? You can do these things (amongst others!):
• look at section headings;
• look for text in bold print;
• look for text in italics;
• look for charts, graphs and pictures, and read their captions.
If you have some idea of, or the context for, what you are about to read, your brain can recognise and
process much more information than if you just dive headlong into a piece of text.
As an example, let’s say that I’m tasked with reading a chapter on the basic properties of waves. So I
follow the guidelines above and I notice that in the chapter on waves there are section headings called:
• “Introduction and Definitions”,
• “Derivation of v = f λ”,
• “The Principle of Superposition”,
• “Phase Difference”, and
• “The Equation of a Progressive Wave”.
There are also several diagrams, with the captions
• “Displacement against distance for...”
• “Displacement against time for...”
• “To illustrate the principle of superposition”, and
• “Sinusoidal wave”.
Done! You get much more out of this if you write this stuff down. So do that.

16.1.2 Preparation 2 : Ask Questions

Just as no four-year-old likes hearing “you have to...”, neither does your brain. You have to give yourself a
reason to read.
How can you do that? One way is by coming up with questions that you want answered as you go through
the “Preparation 1 : Preview” process. That taps into your innate curiosity, and motivates you to do the
reading!
So what questions can I ask myself about this chapter on waves? How about these:
15 Thissort of thing happens even quicker if you’re tired. So that’s one of the reasons for building breaks into the sprints.
16 There’sa very good example of having some idea of what a piece of text is about before you read it on pages 46 − 47 of McGuire
(2015). Check it out.

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• What definitions are there? How many of them are there? Will I have to remember them?
• v = f λ is an equation. Is that the same equation as described in the section “The Equation of a
Progressive Wave”? If not, what’s the difference?
• What on Earth is superposition? Why is it important?
• What on Earth is phase difference? Why is it important? In fact, what is phase for that matter? What’s
the difference between phase and phase difference?
• Why are there different graphs denoting displacement against distance and displacement against
time? What’s the difference? Why are they important?

I could think of more, but that’s plenty for now. All that you need to know at this stage is that doing this
ask-yourself-questions-thing is really beneficial, before you start to read the stuff. You might not be very
good at asking questions yet. You will improve, fast, once you start getting into the habit of doing this
when you read.
And just as before, it’s much better if you write your questions down.
So how can we get answers to these questions? Well...we start reading, of course!!

16.1.3 Recalling and Paraphrasing...

Once you have previewed the text, and you’ve generated some interesting questions that you would like
answered, you are ready to read.
When you start, only read one paragraph at a time. Just read the first paragraph. Stop. Put the book down,
and try to recall the ideas in the paragraph. Then put the information in that first paragraph in your own
words. And it really helps if you write this down.
Now move on to the second paragraph, and do the same thing, except that when you paraphrase this
paragraph, fold in the information from the first paragraph. Remember to recall what’s in the paragraph
before you try to paraphrase it.
Now move on to the third paragraph, and do the same thing, except that when you paraphrase this
paragraph, fold in the information from the first two paragraphs...
...until you have paraphrased the whole piece.
So you think that’s going to take a long time, right? McGuire states that every single one of the students that
she has dicussed this method with reports that it was quicker than the method they had used previously.
And that includes the method of just reading it!!
Using this method, there are no false starts. You move steadily through the text from beginning to end.
Slow and steady wins the race. And another thing: once you’ve done this for a bit, you can get to fairly
accurately estimate how long it will take you to do a piece of reading. That’s also a useful thing to know.

16.1.4 ...Actively
The processes of recalling and paraphrasing, and the making of notes and outlines, should be done in a
way that includes other successful strategies: the creation and use of memory aids, flashcards, mind maps,
and concept maps; the generation of more questions; etc., etc.
And actively reading means that you also take advantage of your natural learning style. So whether you are
a visual, aural/auditory, read/write or kinaesthetic/tactile learner, then you should just do what comes
most naturally to you. I just want to make the point that when I spoke earlier about writing stuff down,
what I actually meant was record it somehow that fits in with your natural learning style.
I’m primarily a visual learner, so when I make notes, yes, there is quite a bit of text, but I also draw lots of
pictures: graphs, charts, tables, mind maps, concept maps, flow charts, etc., etc. I even do Integration by
Parts17 in a kind of picture. The idea is to actively record your learning session somehow. So if making a
video or writing a play so that you can act it out later works for you, fine!!
Reading actively also means that if you are doing a quantitative course, and there are examples in the text,
then you should work through them. This probably sounds really obvious now, and if it does, then perhaps
you are grasping these ideas! I know of a series of Mathematics textbooks that essentially only have section
titles, examples and questions in them. So almost all the teaching is done through examples. If you didn’t
do the examples, you wouldn’t learn anything.
17 Whatever that is!

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16.2 Teaching the Material

Something else you might want to do in a sprint is to teach the material to someone.
We’ve already talked about this in Section 4.1. In trying to explain something to someone else, or even an
inanimate object, you can often highlight gaps in your understanding.
It’s a really good idea. Do it!

16.3 Solving Problems Without Using Examples as as Guide

Another thing that we often do when we are working on our own is to do homework. Or practice solving
problems for a test or exam. And as the title of this section suggests, you should attempt to do your
homework without using worked examples as a guide.
Counter-intuitive? Yes. Will this strategy give you enormous benefit? Most definitely: YES.
Normally when you do a homework on a new topic, you sit down with the questions, and you open the
textbook to the appropriate section. You look at the first problem, and then look in the book for an example
that’s similar to the question, right? I know you do this because everyone does. I did.
This method is exactly the wrong way to go about doing homework problems.
Homework, and example problems encountered in the textbook, should always be treated as an opportunity for
you to test yourself. Study for a homework the same way you would study for a test. Before looking at
the questions, actively read the relevant section in the textbook, and/or your class notes. Work through
the examples And do them without referring to the given solutions. As if you were in a test. Even if you get
stuck, don’t be tempted to sneak a peak at the solution before you’ve finished your “test”.
Once you’ve worked through an example, check the answer. That’s check the answer. Only. Don’t check
the solution. Only check the answer.
If your answer is wrong, then re-read the textbook section, and your notes on the topic, and go through
the example again. But while you are doing the re-reading, see if you can figure out why you got stuck,
or what mistake you made. A great deal of deep learning happens during this investigation phase.
Eventually (hopefully!) you arrive at the correct answer. Only then should you compare your approach
to solving the problem with that of the book (or your teacher). If the approaches are different, are they
both valid? Is your approach better? More understandable to you?18 If so, maybe you should use your
approach in future! If you’re not sure whether your approach is valid, check with your teacher.
Quite often there’s more than one way to solve a problem. And someone else’s solution might not “click”
with you. You might become locked into the way of thinking that what the book has done is the only way
to solve the problem. That’s bad! (See Section 6.2.)
Right. So we’ve read through all the material, and we’ve worked through all the examples, and we’ve got
them all right. Now you can start to tackle the homework.
And of course: you tackle the homework in exactly the same way that you tackled the examples. Treat it as
a test. Revise for the test until you think you are ready. Then take the test. Once you’ve looked at Question
1 (a), and you realise that you aren’t ready for the test, then go and read the textbook section again...
It may occur to you that this way to tackle homework would take more time than you normally allocate
to doing homework. That’s true. It will. So don’t leave homework to the night before (or the night after)
it’s due. Start tackling it straight away. Homework has been given to you to help you understand and
assimilate the material. To get the most out of homework, follow this strategy.
18 When I was at university, studying for my final exams, there was one course in particular that I couldn’t get my head around.
It was called “Materials”, and I didn’t understand any of it. Honestly. Neither did anyone else. The night before the exam I was
looking over the stuff, and wondering how I could possibly answer any question on it. I noticed that on the whole module, there
was only one mathematical derivation of an accepted formula. So I thought that there was a good chance that “Derive the formula
for...” would come up as a question. But I had never understood the derivation before. What could I do? I had the idea that if I
started with the initial assumptions, and used physics that I understood, together with my own symbols for things, then maybe I could
get somewhere. So that’s what I did. And about fifteen minutes later I’d come up with the formula!! My way!!
The next day, that question did come up. And of course, I did it my way! I couldn’t answer any of the other questions, of course,
and no-one else answered any question from that module.
I went to see the guy who taught the course a bit later, and he said “It’s so refreshing to find someone that actually understands
what I’m trying to teach them”. I didn’t have the guts to tell him the truth.

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16.4 Creating Practice Exams

Another good idea for something to do in a sprint is to create practice exams. If you’ve got a test coming
up, and you want to know what will be on the test, then you could always ask your teacher. If she tells
you to “go away” (or something else which is semantically equivalent), then what could you do?
You could look in the textbook and the notes that you took in classes, and you could deduce what topics
will come up on the test. And then you could go one step further, and create your own practice test! You can
do this by looking at various questions from the textbook, or past exam papers. Groups are really good
at doing this because you could assign each person in the group the responsibility for putting questions
together for a particular topic. And that way you won’t know what all the questions are going to be in
advance!
Then, obviously, you could take your practice test! And take it in the same way as you do homework
questions (See Section 16.3.)
The theory supporting this strategy is outlined in Section 10.

16.5 Learning Stuff

There will be occasions when you just have to learn some facts. In that case, try using a flash card system.
They work. There are other techniques to improve memory, which I might talk about one day, but for now,
let’s keep it simple.
It’s best if you make your own flash cards, as writing the cards helps the learning process. But there are
very good electronic flash card systems that you can use on all your media devices. (See Section 8.)

16.6 Summary
Here, then, is a summary of the typical things that you will do during your sprints.

Read Actively

Solve Problems Without Using Solved Examples

Teach the Material

Create Practice Exams

Learn Stuff Using Flash Cards

17 Mistakes
Are msitakes good or bad? You know what? It entirely depends on when you make them.
Mistakes are great if you don’t make them on your final exam. Then they’re pretty naff. But right up to
that point, mistakes represent a golden opportunity (Zull (2012)). When you do your homework without
access to the solutions (that are all too easily found on-line these days), and you make mistakes, you are
going through the training program that your brain needs to be able to tackle the final exam without
internet access.
So don’t worry about making mistakes as you study. As long as they are your mistakes, and you have tried
to tackle the problem meaningfully, then you will learn from the mistakes you make. But to do that, you
need to analyse them. That means you need to explain (at least to yourself) what each mistake was, and
what you should have done instead.

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17.1 Analysing Mistakes

I would highly recommend keeping a little notebook in which you write an explanation of each mistake
you make, when you make it. That’s right: all of them.
Every time you have a test, or homework, or exam, have a look at the mistakes that you have made. Write
them in your notebook.
Just going through the process of physically writing down what the mistake was, and what you should
have done instead, is a really powerful motivator for not making so many mistakes in the future! Because
it takes time and effort to write all this down.
But there are more important reasons for doing this:
• It cements in your mind the nature of the mistake. Writing down the mistake will reduce the chance
of you making the mistake in the future, because just as you are about to make that same mistake
again, your brain may well remember this moment now, and the nature of the mistake, and prevent
you from making it again.
• It enables you to analyse all the mistakes you make as a group. That means you can see if there is a
pattern to them. Do you continue to make the same kind of mistake time and time again? If so, try
and do something concrete about trying to avoid the mistake. Take remedial action...

17.2 Taking Remedial Action

Here’s a couple of examples of what I mean about taking remedial action. These are actions that I did
when I was at school, to try and avoid making particular kinds of mistakes. Mistakes that I had identified
I kept making by looking through my mistake notebook, and trying to spot patterns.

17.2.1 Doing One Thing at a Time in Algebra

When I started learning about how to solve equations in algebra, the idea that, in order to manipulate an
equation, you could do anything you like to the equation, so long as you do the same thing to both sides came pretty
quickly. To get from one line of working to the next I started thinking in terms of “What do I do to both
sides next?”. This is all very good, and I was very successful.
So successful in fact that I had another great idea19 . Why not do two things to both sides at the same
time?? That way I’ll use less ink and paper, get to the answer quicker, and become a super-hero. Why not
three things at the same time???
Of course, yes, I used less ink. Yes, I got to the answer quicker. Did I get the right answer? What do you
think?
But I persisted with this ridiculous goal, of doing as much as I could with one line of working, for ages.
It was only when I started keeping a record of the mistakes that I made that I realised that lots of times
my mistake was that because I was doing so much in my head from one line of working to the next, I was
often getting it wrong.
So, quite simply, I adopted the procedure of only doing one thing at a time when working through algebra.
When I adopted this strategy, I discovered several really important benefits:
• I started getting many more correct answers, which was of course the main benefit, but I also found
that
• my work was easy to check, as I’d written everything down so it was easy to follow, and that
• when I was trying to explain what I had done to someone else (teaching, in other words), it was very
easy for them to follow what I had done.
Win, win, win!

17.2.2 Limits on Integrals

If you know something about integration in Maths, and you have covered the integral transformation
technique called “substitution”, then check out Appendix B. There’s something there you might find to
your advantage.
19 Or so I thought...

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18 The Big Picture

So here’s the big picture. It’s an extremely abbreviated version of what you need to do to learn stuff.
The circles represent sprints: you could think of it a bit like a clock face representing an hour: the red bit
shows the time when you are working (≈ 40 minutes); the green bit shows the time when you’re playing
(≈ 20 minutes)!

Remember:
Attend
Set up a good environment Sprints:
the Class
Think about your learning level
Get into Teach Mode Review the Material
Regular Spaced Repetition
Regular Self-Testing
Interleaving
The
Preview the Study
Material Cycle

On to the Sprints:
next class...
Read Actively
Do Some Work
No Solve Problems
Assess your in Teach Mode
Teach Stuff
Learning
Create Exams
Learn Stuff

Are you Keep a

preparing for Misatkes
a test or exam? notebook!!

Sprints:

Yes Do
Past Paper
Questions

Sprints:
Plan and
Timetable Understand Revision
Your Revision as Much as
Possible

Sprints:

Learn
as Much as
Possible

Figure 5: The Big Picture

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A The Pythagorean Identity Revisited

This time around, I want to learn the following trigonometrical identities:20

sin2 ( x ) + cos2 ( x ) ≡ 1
1 + cot2 ( x ) ≡ cosec2 ( x ) (2)
2 2
tan ( x ) + 1 ≡ sec ( x )

I could just learn the equations and hope I remember them when it comes to exam time. But as I’ve said,
for me that’s not the greatest plan21 .
Instead, how about learning this picture: I don’t know about you, but I find learning pictures easier than

1
sin( x )

x
cos( x )

Figure 6: My Replacement for SOH CAH TOA! (Revisited)

learning words and equations. Now if we know this picture, then we can work out what all the three equations
are that we need to learn. Let’s see how we can do this. First, we know Pythagoras’ Theorem. And our
picture is of a right-angled triangle, so we can just use that directly. That gives us the first equation:

sin2 ( x ) + cos2 ( x ) ≡ 1 (3)

Now to get the other equations, instead of learning them, we can use what we already know. Let’s start
with Equation (3), and divide both sides of the equation by sin2 ( x ):

sin2 ( x ) cos2 ( x ) 1
2
+ 2
≡ 2
sin ( x ) sin ( x ) sin ( x )
⇒ 1 + cot2 ( x ) ≡ cosec2 ( x )

And if start with Equation (3), and divide both sides of the equation by cos2 ( x ):

sin2 ( x ) cos2 ( x ) 1
2
+ 2
≡
cos ( x ) cos ( x ) cos2 ( x )
⇒ tan2 ( x ) + 1 ≡ sec2 ( x )
So we have a choice: we can either try and learn the equations (2) directly, as three unrelated facts, or
we can learn the picture (Figure 6) and a process. The three equations (2) are known as the Pythagorean
Identities. It’s not hard to see why. They are all equivalent to Pythagoras’ Theorem through Figure 6 and a
bit of algebra. Learning the picture and the process shows a lot more mathematical sophistication, I think.
It shows a level of understanding, doesn’t it?

A.1 Understanding...
I have been teaching mathematics now for over 40 years, and I have never learned equations (2). I don’t
need to22 . I know where they come from. So if I need one of them any time, I just work it out.
Another thing that’s really interesting about equations (2) is that they divide the six fundamental trigono-
metrical functions, sin( x ), cos( x ), sec( x ), tan( x ), cosec( x ), and cot( x ) into three pairs of functions: (1) sin( x )
1 cos( x ) 1
20 If you’ve never come across cot( x ), cosec( x ) or sec( x ) before, they are defined like this: cot( x ) ≡ tan( x )
≡ sin( x )
, cosec( x ) ≡ sin( x )
and sec( x ) ≡ cos1( x) . Why we need these things, I’ll never know. We could so easily do without them altogether.
21 There are worse plans. The Scottish army deciding to invade England during the Black Death, for example.
22 So I can keep my brain clear so that it can remember useful information, like who won the F.A. Cup in 1948.

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and cos( x ), (2) sec( x ) and tan( x ), and (3) cosec( x ) and cot( x ). It turns out that these pairs of functions are
related in other ways too. By differentiation and integration, for example. So we are forging links between
different areas of our subject. We are forming patterns. Chunks, as Barbara Oakley calls them. General
principles that we can use in other situations.
And while we’re on the subject, there’s another thing I’d like to get off my chest: I called Figure 6 “My
Replacement for SOH CAH TOA!” for a good reason. I never use SOH CAH TOA. It’s crap. All you need
is Figure 623 . It’s interesting that Figure 6 is actually the definition of sin( x ) and the definition of cos( x ).
SOH CAH TOA is built on top of Figure 6. But Figure 6 is easier to use than SOH CAH TOA!! So why
do we teach something artificial, something that’s only been created to help learn Figure 6, when learning
the picture is easier???

B Limits on Integrals
When you first start to integrate functions, you come across the idea of limits on integrals. These are
normally written at the top and the bottom of the integral sign like this:
Z2

and what that means in something like this

Z2
( x + 5)2 dx (4)
0

is that 0 and 2 are values of x. Every book you have ever seen, and every exam, write limits this way.
The problem with this is that when you start learning about integral transformation techniques such
as “substitution”, where the idea is that you transform the integral by changing the variable from x to
something else, then you open up the way for a specific type of mistake.
When you transform an integral like (4), you do it by introducing a new variable, u, say, that you hope
will transform the integral from something you can’t integrate, into something you can integrate. And you
could do that like this. Let u = x + 5. Then when you go through the motions, and you transform the
function (the ( x + 5)2 bit), and you transform the differential (the dx bit), into u-stuff you get
Z2
u2 du (5)
0

And at this point it’s really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you have done all the transforming
you need to do. As I very often used to do. But those limits are values of x, not u! We have to transform the
limits as well! And when you write your limits as in (5) (as everyone does), then you can easily fall into
this trap.
However, if you wrote your limits like this
xZ=2

( x + 5)2 dx
x =0

(showing very clearly that 0 and 2 are both values of x) then after transforming the function and the
differential, you get
xZ=2

u2 du
x =0

and it’s really clear that you have not transformed your limits yet. You have vastly reduced the possibility
of making the I-forgot-to-transform-my-limits-again mistake.
23 And the definition of tan( x ), actually.

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Notes
1 This is an endnote.

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