The Best Studying method I've Found by William
Williamof Columbus's entry into Varsity Tutor's January 2014 scholarship contest
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The Best Studying method I've Found by William - January 2014 Scholarship Essay
The best studying method I have come across is the Quiz-and-Recall method that Cal Newport advocates in his book How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less. The method is simply reading the material out loud in your own words to yourself. If you cannot explain it in your own words than you do not know the material well enough and you need to review over it more. The material that you were able to successfully summarize would become easier to recall later on, as you have a deeper understanding of it as well as more complex connections being made as you say them aloud.
Before I found this method I had touched on similar concepts by reading Richard Feynman's, the famous physicist and professor, book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: (Adventures of a Curious Character). In his book he recounts a story where he would aggravate the people in the Math department at the Princeton graduate school by challenging them to explain a theorem (real or not) to him in easy to understand terms and he would be able to guess the fake ones and the correct ones. Now, he used a fair bit of trickery and arguing over semantics to keep this up, but he does go on to say that this method does actually work well with the use of examples. The more examples you ask for the more well-rounded your understanding of a concept is.
Later on in school, I would help other students with their Computer Science assignments. I'm a pretty selfish guy, admittedly, so I don't like to spend any more time than I have to. This means that my method of teaching had to be efficient enough and successful enough that I don't need to repeat myself very often or go over the same material again. I thought back to Feynman's book and decided to use his method, but from the other side, as the person teaching. Using this method, I would explain in the most basic terms I could, and use numerous examples. This proved to be pretty successful in not only helping them understand the course material, but also keeping my free time relatively untouched.
When I read Cal Newport's book it started to make sense as to why I was successful at helping my classmates. Newport's and Feynman's techniques are really the same method packaged in different ways. Both methods, at their core, are about using common language to learn. Using the quiz-and-recall method I have been very successful in studying for exams.