Day 2: What Matters More: Method or Motivation? The Answer May Surprise You…

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Welcome to the second day of the week-long Learn Faster Bootcamp. Yesterday I sent you an email explaining why you forget so much of what you read, and how you can protect yourself against forgetting:

Day 1: How to stop forgetting what you read
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/06/22/stop-forgetting/

Which matters more for how much you retain: the method you use or your motivation to learn something?

Motivation seems like the obvious answer. After all, if you’re not motivated, you won’t pick up a book or sit through a class. And in this sense, motivation is very important.

But now imagine a slightly different situation. I expose you to some information and test you on it later. Will you do better on my later test if you were motivated to remember the information or not?

Here, the surprising answer is that motivation doesn’t matter.

To understand this counterintuitive result, let me take you back to 1969 where Thomas Hyde and James Jenkins established it in an interesting experiment.

Hyde and Jenkins divided the subjects of the study in two different ways. The first division was their motivation condition. The subjects were given a list of words to read, except half of them were told that remembering the words were important and that they would be tested on it later. The other half were not given any reason to remember the words.

These two groups were each further subdivided into different subgroups. Each of these subgroups were given different instructions for processing the words. Some were given a relatively superficial task (checking whether each word contained the letter ‘e’). Others were given a deeper task (checking whether each word was pleasant or not).

The results? Motivation, in the form of knowing the information was important and would be tested later, had no impact on how well the subjects did on the later test.

Let that sink in for a moment. Once the subjects had gotten over the hurdle of exposing themselves to the information, being more motivated to learn had no impact on how much they remembered.

What did matter, interestingly enough, was how they processed the information. Students who did shallower processing only remembered half as many words as those who used deeper processing. The result was the same regardless of whether they were trying to remember the words or not.

This has led to the psychological principle knowing as levels of processing. I’ve only mentioned a single study, but the general principle is very robust and has been substantiated by many experiments. The idea is simple: deeper, more elaborative processing improves memory, intention to learn doesn’t matter much.

This is one of the reasons why smart learners can often appear to learn things without having to put in any effort. Because, if they learn holistically, they’re making connections between ideas, creating analogies and linking examples. These are all deep ways to process the material, which leads to much better retention than students who really do want to retain the information but are inadvertantly processing it in a much shallower way.

This is also another reason why I’m so critical of how most learners take notes.

The typical note-taking approach is to copy down everything that is being said, in the way that the speaker says it. I call this transcription style notes because they resemble a somewhat reduced transcript.

The problem with transcription style notes is that copying down exactly what is being said doesn’t require deep processing. In fact, it actively discourages deep processing, because in order to keep up with your transcription you don’t have space to deeply think about what is being said, you just have time to copy.

The advantage of transcription style notes is that you have a very accurate record of the lecture. This might be important for you if the lecture is so dense that you’ll need to spend many multiples of the listening time to fully learn it, or you’re confident that the information of the lecture is unavailable in any other format.

However, I don’t feel that these two conditions hold for the majority of cases. In most listening situations you can access similar information using other resources and the time spent in class is a sizeable chunk of your total learning time once you remove assignments and problem sets.

Given these two conditions rarely hold, why do so many students insist on transcription style notes?

My guess is that most have never considered an alternative. They were taught that the way to learn in class is to dutifully copy almost everything said, and that they shouldn’t risk writing down anything different in case they make a mistake.

I say this is nonsense. If you want to learn faster, the best way to start is to increase the amount you learn from the time you already need to spend listening to lectures.

So how should you take notes?

There are a lot of different note-taking techniques that can support deeper levels of processing. The key is that the act of notetaking should serve as an orienting technique. That means it is a task that, simply by performing the task, you’re guaranteeing that you will think about the information in a deeper way.

I cover a few of these different methods in Learning on Steroids, such as active reading and flow-based notetaking, which will reopen for the last time after this bootcamp concludes.

For now, I’ll just give one method which is simple and fairly general-purpose: paraphrasing notes.

With paraphrasing notes you take notes normally, except that you’re not allowed to write down the words the speaker uses. The only exceptions are key terms and definitional phrases which have to be remembered exactly. All supporting language and explanation, has to be in your own words.

This may sound trivial, but when you actually hold yourself to this rule you’ll quickly realize how much of your current notetaking is simply copying what the other person says. When you’re no longer allowed to use the exact phrases the lecturer uses you have to start really thinking about what is being said in order to translate it into your own thoughts. Which, of course, is exactly the point.

Take Action Now

If you’ve followed thus far, now is the time to take action. Obviously, for full effect, you need to practice paraphrasing notes with actual classes, videos or audio recordings. It may also take you several times before the habit of only writing down your own words kicks in.

For now, I’d just like to give you a chance to practice this method (and remember it better). Today’s action step is very simple:

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll share another method for learning better which you can start using right away.