5 strategies for remembering everything you learn

 

If you're going to learn anything, you need two kinds of prior knowledge:
• Knowledge about the subject at hand, like math, history, or programming
• Knowledge about how learning actually works

The bad news: Our education system often skips one of them. This is problematic, given that your ability to learn is such a huge predictor of success in life, from achieving in academics to getting ahead at work. To succeed over the long term, you have to master skill after skill. 

 

Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge. We're comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself — the 'met cognitive' aspects of learning — is more hit-or-miss, and it shows." To wit, education research shows that low-achieving students have "substantial deficits" in their understanding of the cognitive strategies that allow people to learn well. It's a cultural issue.

Here are learning strategies that really work.

1. Force yourself to recall

2. Don't go easy on yourself

3. Don't fall for fluency

4. Connect the new thing to the old things

5. Reflect, reflect, reflect