Tips to improve Learning with writing [part 1]

Learning is an important part of everyone's growth, whether it was academically or just a normal person who's learning important life knowledge and skills. Every human being has to learn, for life, for work, for their studies, etc...

I'm specifically targeting students in this essay because they have to learn about various complicated things. But I'll talk about things that hopefully benefit everyone that wants to learn anything.

If you consider yourself as someone who's cursed with a bad memory, or you're studying for long periods, but getting little results and you think that that's just the way you are, it is all about genes and you can not change. Fortunately, that is not true, it's all under your control and it mostly depends on which methods you use while learning.

I've spent some time learning how to learn, I've read a book and watched tons of videos with that title. I enjoy metacognition topics - awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes - because it has helped me rocket my grades and substantially improved my comprehension just by adopting a few changes and habits that I've learned. My confidence in my abilities to achieve whatever I want if I just put in the effort was the best outcome so far, and I want to help spread the knowledge that has helped me believe that everyone, brilliants as well as weak students, have similar abilities.

Have you ever been taught how to learn correctly at school? The answer for most of us is no, we were just given textbooks and were told to attend classes. Every student was left to study on their own, some students used better studying techniques and they excelled as a result. Everyone can do the same if they applied the essential principles for efficient studying. In this blog, I'll explain those principles and suggest writing practices as an example that fulfill them.

ive learning vs Active learning

Before that, let's discuss the most common ways of learning and studying and how our brain reacts to them.

Reading, watching, and listening. All of them are forms of ive learning, which means consuming content and receiving information but not doing more than that. The problem is that our brain needs to forget information, it will do that by ignoring what doesn't seem to be important because it needs to preserve its energy and space for the important stuff. ive learning doesn't do anything that encourages the brain to try and that information. But if you make an effort to learn something, your brain will work hard on it. And when you get back and back to that thing, eventually, your brain will understand that that thing is important to you. Each time you tell your brain: " that thing again," your brain will make more neurons, strengthen the connections and form a substance on these specific neurons that make the signals travel faster; which leads you to understand more and faster. ive learning is probably only done once, and when it is done, there is no effort made that will make the brain struggle. And we want the brain to struggle, the brain is plastic and works like a muscle, when you put stress on the muscle, you tell it needs to grow stronger to be able to overcome that struggle. When effort is involved, when you produce instead of just perceiving, that is called active learning.

Have you ever thought about what makes some information stick and some do not? The rest of this blog will be about that. And while I explain the most important rules, ill be comparing between ive, and active learning methods.

1. Effortful Learning: writing for evaluation and improvement

First of all, to provoke our brain to something, we need to make it effortful as I said, and we need to test our memory and understanding to ensure that we have understood something fully. When you learn something, don't stop there, pause and try to explain that thing in the most clear and easy-to-understand way. I promise you that if you do this practice often, you're gonna be a genius. Einstein says "If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, then you don't understand it yourself." Because we tend to get the illusion that we understand something fully just because it looks familiar, but that is not the same thing. You don't have to have a kid or anyone around to do this practice, you can just talk to yourself aloud - which is what I usually do and it works just fine for less important things -, even better, you can write it down on a paper, this way you can evaluate accurately how much you , and spot the gaps in your understanding to get back and fill them. As you do this regularly, you will not only nail the subject but also train your brain to focus from the beginning and expand its capacity to hold more new information in the working memory for longer periods. We can indeed improve our mental power just like our physical power, just that whatever you practice, you get good at.

Moreover, testing the memory of a topic that you've just learned (or even just read about) helps consolidate it, and makes you understand what you'll learn after much more than if you didn't. Taking time after learning something and reviewing it is just as important as learning it, because what is the use of learning it in the first place if you won't be able to it?

That is the first practice that I've wanted to share. I'll talk about more habits related to writing that will improve your learning process later, but until then, just consider trying this new habit and take your time experimenting with it to find out how to do it the way that it suits you. And if you haven't guessed, I'm also writing it to apply it myself as well.

As long as you are making an effort to something, and feeling like you're physically squeezing your brain to get the knowledge out again (without cheating while doing it), you will force your brain to develop.

That was all I have for part 1. It's only a simple one, but very effective tip. 'Till next time!

#Scholarsociety