There’s an old Chinese saying: sharpening your axe will not delay your job of chopping wood. I didn’t have a clear idea about effective learning until I encountered some popular YouTube videos posted by a YouTuber. I realised how ineffective my learning method was and how much time I have wasted because of that. So I decided to improve my learning strategy. In this post I am going to do some reflection and summarise the points.
Ineffective learning methods
1. Highlighting
I have a lot of highlighters on my desk and I always feel good of a textbook full of notes and highlights. It somehow ‘demonstrates’ that I have devoted time and effort to ‘studying the textbook’. However this is not an effective learning strategy according to the research. In this way, we are taking in the knowledge passively and spending the least amount of energy to process and digest the content.
2. Taking notes by copying
Personally I feel taking notes by simply copying the context sometimes helps in better understanding the content. It helps me to concentrate and think step by step while I was writing things down slowly. However just taking notes will not help us to memories the content better and we can easily forget about what we have learnt some time after because…
