In recent years, a growing body of research has shown that our intelligence is not static, and that our brains can evolve and change as we learn.
A person's knowledge and talents can grow, as long as the person has their own learning goals and can learn in the right way.
Speaking of learning methods, I have read a lot of books on learning methods recently, but I feel that the methods in this book are the most effective.
Whether you are a student or a professional, this method applies, and it can be said that this is the underlying logic of learning.
The book is Cognitive Nature: Psychological Laws That Make Learning Easy, and the methods described in the book are mainly divided into three steps: retrieval, refinement, and generation.
Retrieval
Have you all used Baidu to check things? Searching is similar to this, it's about finding things from our brains.
So how do you look it up from your brain?
That is to say, no matter what we learn, we should stop in time to ask questions to our brains. Ask yourself what you just learned? What is the core point of view, what is the main content of what I have just learned, not to memorize what I have learned, but to say it in my own words.
For example, endorsement, our most common method is to read it over and over again, and everyone thinks that this method is effective. Because repeating it in this way will give us the illusion that we are familiar with reading it and must be able to memorize it. But when you close the book and memorize it, you find that it is stuck.
How is the search method done?
That is, do not repeat the reading, after reading it once, you will start to recite it sentence by sentence, you can understand this sentence while reading it, and you can also think of the picture of this sentence. Then I started to close the book, take this sentence from my head, see if what we took out is the same, correct it if it is not the same, and then memorize it a few times. For a whole paragraph, you can also understand the key words of each sentence and understand the order of paragraph sentences. That is to say, this way of searching is based on understanding.
We all know that to search for a thing on Baidu, you can directly enter a keyword or a sentence, and then you can search for a lot of related things.
In fact, we retrieve the same from the brain, we have to learn or heard something, with a keyword or a key question to retrieve it, to see if the brain has saved it. Only after retrieving, it can be stored in the brain.
Why? Because if we just read books and don't use our brains to understand, there won't be any changes in the brain, and if we try to extract information from the brain, the brain will leave traces. This trace shows that we have written something in the brain, and in order to consolidate the memory, we also need to retrieve it at intervals, that is, we can retrieve it before we forget, so that we can strengthen the memory and deepen the trace.
School assignments, unit tests, etc. are designed to help students deepen their memorization of new learning.
And our learning at work, can not just blindly listen to others talk about PPT, but to contact what we hear with what we know, and ask ourselves some questions. When we ourselves are studying, we must also ask ourselves some questions, and then answer these questions, that is, we must test our own learning. Only in this way can we know whether we have really mastered this part of the content, rather than mastering familiarity.
In the future, when you read a book, you should remember to stop from time to time and ask yourself, what is the core content of this part just now? What did I learn from this section? Or you can also write these down by writing the method of promoting learning, and the process of writing is also a process of knowledge collation. When you finally finish reading and learning, you will make a summary question and organize the previous content bit by bit into a veined and structured content.
Retrieval is to test their mastery of what they have just learned, clearly know what they have mastered and what they have not mastered, so as to better strengthen learning for weak links.
After talking about retrieval, what is refinement?
Refinement
Refinement is what it means, that is, when we learn, when we understand a concept, we should relate it to what we already know in our own minds. For example, explain the concept in a familiar story or a familiar case. This not only deepens understanding, but also connects old and new knowledge, which allows different neurons in the brain to make real connections and form our new knowledge network.
For example, if you have just learned growth thinking, what kind of behaviors and behaviors may you retrieve in your brain that belong to growth thinking? What kind of environment is the environment for growth thinking? What kind of people have a growth mindset?
When you ask these questions to yourself, you will have people and things with a growth mindset in your mind, as well as some scenarios. And if you can tell these people and things and scenes, it will not only deepen your understanding and memory of growth thinking, but also exercise your expression ability.
Refinement is to check whether we really have this knowledge, whether we really understand, and whether we really use this knowledge.
Many times, people use both retrieval and refinement when reflecting.
For example, the example in the book is a surgeon who reflects on all the surgeries he has performed during the day every night. He thinks about what is done well, what is not done well, and if he does not do well, he will think in his head about how to improve, directly in the head of the first rehearsal, is a clear drill again, 1, 2, 3, 4 steps are how, the next day, if possible, he will do it again in the laboratory to verify his idea.
The drill part of his reflection process belongs to the process of refining knowledge and truly combining knowledge with reality.
After talking about refinement, what kind of ghost is the generation?
generate
In my understanding, this is to use these newly learned things to solve the various special problems encountered in reality, which are not the same problems that you see when you study, but are variations of these problems, which requires us to learn and apply them after learning, rather than just copying the answers to the same problems.
For example, when Dweck, the author of "Lifelong Growth", and her boyfriend were dating, her boyfriend said, "I want a little more space!" ”
When Dweck heard this, she was confused, because she was originally a person with a fixed mindset (that is, she was more likely to be a fixed mindset from childhood to adulthood). So, when she heard this sentence, she thought: It's over, this is going to break up!
But fortunately, she already knew about growth thinking, so her thinking mode switched. She thought that she should think in the bright side, first asking the reason: "What do you mean by that sentence?" ”
"You see, I'm all on the edge of the stool, you move a little bit over there."
It turned out to be so, what a false alarm!
The surgeon in the book constantly reflects on his surgical process every day, thinking about how to do it best from all aspects, so that he will generate his own mental model of dealing with the problem, and the next time he encounters a new emergency, he can think of a wonderful way to solve it.
For example, the pilot is also, he constantly practices, while explaining will also use his hands to really do the operation of the action, so that his working memory and body into one, in order to calmly deal with unexpected situations.
We can see from the generation step that to generate a mental model of our own problems, we need to constantly practice deliberately, not repeat the practice, but each time have a further clear goal.
Our learning starts from retrieval, from refinement to practice, only after continuous retrieval, coupled with enough refinement practice, so that the knowledge in our brain gradually forms a net, in order to achieve knowledge generation.
Today's learning method is finished, so grab a book and try this learning method!