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The Holy Grail of Learning Fast
Wade Anderson
September 06, 2024
Quizzing, or self-testing, is without a doubt the holy grail of learning fast.
Often we think of testing as a way to evaluate but it’s actually a highly effective way to learn. Why?
From NEJM Knowledge:
Some posit that testing works differently in the brain than studying. Testing asks your brain to remember information on cue: this process could perhaps organize and create connections that our brains later recognize.
“When you’re retrieving something out of a computer’s memory, you don’t change anything — it’s simple playback,” said Robert Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the New York Times. “When we use our memories by retrieving things, we change our access” to that information, Dr. Bjork said. “What we recall becomes more recallable in the future. In a sense you are practicing what you are going to need to do later.”
In this sense, you are in fact learning, not just recalling, when you test yourself on your understanding of a topic, be it a simple fact or a series of processes and complex inferences.
A decade or so ago I was studying for the GMAT, an entrance exam for business school. One of my good friends achieved a perfect score on the SAT. To ace the SAT, he told me his system was to take as many practice exams as possible.
I did the same thing for the GMAT. Every week I took 2-3 practice exams all the way through. I studied the questions I got wrong. By the time I took the exam, my mind was fully ready and I aced it!
How does this apply to learning on the job?
Get in the habit of not only reading information. Read, then quiz.
When we read blogs or listen to podcasts, we’re putting the information in our working memory but it won’t stick unless we do something to get it in our long term memory.
Self testing is what we are looking for.
Don’t just read a blog. Read then ask ChatGPT to quiz you on it.
Don’t just listen to a podcast. Listen then write out in your learning journal what you remember.
Learning on the job is not the same as acing tests. In some ways it’s more important though.
We want to get better at our jobs. We get better when we become learning machines by remembering more of what we read and listen to.
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