The Danger of Active Recall

most people are using active recall all wrong and that's a big problem right because active recall is the best study technique there is period proper utilization of active recall took me from a b student to an a student and all of this was during medical school I wish I had learned about using active recall properly in like high school or even College because then I would have scored higher on every single test that I would have took and also I would have learned more in this video I'm going to tell you why most people are

using active recall like all wrong completely wrong and I'm going to give you the exact tips you need to make sure you're efficient and effective when using active recall so let's talk about what is active recall but first before we even talk about what is active recall let's talk about what isn't active recall so rereading highlighting underlining watching listening this is an active recall you those things sound pretty easy to do right you can reread a book without taking much energy you can listen to something you can watch this video without committing much mental energy

it takes such little mental effort in fact that maybe while you're watching this video you're also on your phone or eating a snack or talking to a friend because that's how little mental space it's taking up to watch this video That's how little mental space passive learning takes up but we want to take up mental space we want to learn and that's what active recall does real active recall is hard it makes your brain work hard you can't do a hundred other things when you're actually truly using active recall good active recall example are exams

right practice questions or flashcards in one study two groups of people people were asked to remember as many names as possible in a party scenario so imagine you're meeting tons of people and you have to remember as many of these people's names as you possibly can well one group was made to study using active recall and practice testing while the other one was told to study by just reading over the fact the active recall group recalled 11.5 names which is 57 on average while the other group recalled 5.8 names which is 29 on average they

were meant to try to remember 20 names which means that the active recall group scored about 20 percent higher than the passive learning group that's two letter grades finally in one review article called improving students learning which looked at over a hundred different other studies and referenced 100 other sources looked at summarizing active recall practice testing rereading highlighting underlining and a couple other study techniques and they came to the conclusion that there were two certain study strategies which won among all of those other study strategies and that was practice testing which is a form of

active recall right and distributed practice which is another form of active recall and guess which study methods they said were the worst study strategies to use yes summarizing highlighting and re-reading all forms of passive learning now let's talk about making sure we're using it effectively and efficiently the first thing I want to talk about is mindset the first significant shift you need to make in using active recall correctly is to pay attention to your big old brain yes the most calorie hungry organ in your entire body pay attention to how you feel when you're studying

active recall should feel tough you should be able to tell you are doing active recall just by the feeling you have inside your brain watching this video is easy right that's passive learning but thinking of the equation 13 times 27 go ahead try and figure it out that's tough right you have to sit there and think about it you can't be doing other things 13 by times 27 if you're a normal human takes a little bit of time to figure out in your head you may even need to pause this video when figuring out the

answer to that in your head just because of the mental effort it takes importantly you can fall into the Trap of having those active recall things flash cards and practice testing actually become passive learning well how does that happen well this can happen right which has happened to me if you're not having true attempts at the practice questions or the flash cards for the practice questions if you just say oh I don't know the answer click an answer and then see the answer so you can read it all right that's just passive learning you're just

reading stuff you're not actually testing your brain and for the flash cards if you don't know the answer sometimes you'll just flip the card over right to see the answer without having a true attempt in your head a true attempt to figure out what's going on and that's what active recall is if you're just flipping the flash card if you're just reading the practice question answers then you're not really using active recall and there are actually studies that show by just testing yourself even if you have no idea what the answer is your retention and

your learning of that information goes way up compared to when you just flip the information over when you just see the answer so for me what I do is whenever I'm doing practice questions I make sure to write down the answer somewhere maybe that's just a or maybe that's an actual filled in kind of description of what the answer is and then for flash cards you have to be very very careful here make sure you say an answer in your head to the flash card before flipping over the flash card and I think it's harder

to fall into this trap with practice questions but it's very easy to fall into this trap with flashcards so when you're about to flip a flash card wait take a pause and make sure you've answered the question in your head what's kind of on the other side of the flash card what do you think the answer is bottom line active recall is tough it should feel tough when going over practice questions or flashcards make sure you are actually having an attempt at the questions on your own before flipping over and seeing the answer tip number

two is to understand the information before you use active recall you should have a basic understanding of what you're testing yourself on before you test yourself on that information I know this seems pretty straightforward but again I've mentioned this over and over and over again you can't just go straight to flashcards you can't just go straight to practice questions you need to build a base of knowledge otherwise kind of you're just going to start memorizing answers or not really understanding what's going on and unfortunately I can't teach you how to understand everything with the bazillion

different things to learn and the bazillion different ways to learn them you have to figure out for yourself what's the best way to learn information if you want to know what I do I'll link to my zero note strategy above but in that zero node strategy right I'm previewing the information so I'm getting a basic understanding on lecture slides and then I'm viewing the information the next day in the lecture after reviewing it on my own to confirm that understanding before actually testing myself with practice questions the same day or later on that day when

I actually see the lecture bottom line is you need to get a basic understanding of the topic before you do any form of self-testing [Music] number three is sleep on it why do I wait at least one day before beginning my active recall practice of the material well studies show that a good night's sleep helps solidify memories and information in our brain not only that but in a really cool study from nature it showed that overnight we are actually not only solidifying information but our brain is creating new connections coming up with new information while

we sleep and I want to talk about this study a little bit just because of how cool it is so basically you have two groups of participants and they're both taught this complicated algorithm for solving a math problem both groups are said to wait 12 hours before being tested on this once again but one group that 12 hours involves overnight so they get a full night's sleep before being tested on this algorithm again and then with the other group the 12 hours is during the daytime right so not when they get a night's sleep so

just morning tonight as opposed to night the next morning now secretly there is an easier faster way to solve this problem a secret equation a secret answer to solving this problem more quickly now both groups of subjects were then retested 12 hours later remember both groups are waiting 12 hours but one group gets a night of sleep and one group does not get a night of sleep well the group that had the sleep right came up with the solution two times as much as the group that did not sleep that's crazy in Dreamland our brain

is creating new Solutions coming up with new ideas not only solidifying information that's why before I start testing myself on what I learned I like to get a full night's sleep before that begins so again before my lectures right the night before the day before I've already previewed the material and gotten a basic understanding of that material so that way when I show up to lecture I want to start testing myself I've had a night's sleep on an understanding already of the material bottom line have a good night's sleep after first studying the material before

you start testing yourself tip number four is practice questions and flash cards are number one practice questions and flashcards are the most evidence-based and well-studied ways to study and retain information with active recall if you could only pick one however probably practice questions Edge out flash cards by a little bit when I would talk to my friends in medical school anecdotally the students that did more practice questions usually were correlated with higher grades so bottom line the best forms of active recall are practice testing and flash cards tip number five is you need to plan

your studying yes active recall and practice testing sound amazing but how do we actually use it on a daily basis just saying to yourself oh I'm gonna review biology with active recall that's a sure way to fail and not study where and what are the practice questions you'll be using are they in the textbook did the teacher give you some questions can you find an online resource with these practice questions which ones should you should you do did the teacher recommend certain questions will the test be based off of certain questions so think about all

the questions you need to answer all the studying you need to do and then I would divide it by the amount of time you have to study that information so for example if you were taking two classes during the week the night before the first class right I would preview and understand the information then the next day I would show up to class try and understand what's going on even more and then you can start practice testing and using active Recall now the second night or the second day after you had that class I would

use active recall again to test yourself and kind of solidify this information and then I would just repeat that for class two when I ever class two is during the week bottom line plan as precisely as possible what you will be studying at least one week before you actually need to study that information [Music] tip number six is capture your incorrect answers okay so you're blasting through practice questions you're flipping over billions and trillions of flash cards and you can feel your brain really work on you're using active recall well how can we level up

active recall even more well simply when you're doing practice questions and you get a question wrong create a flash card based off that incorrect practice question then right theoretically you should never get that kind of practice question wrong again make sure you're creating a flashcard based on the actual piece of information that you don't understand as opposed to just the entire practice question right because we want to be as efficient as possible in creating these flashcards we don't want thousands and hundreds of thousands of flashcards and I found this is a fantastic multiplier for test

scores because you're uniquely matching you're uniquely filling your own gaps in knowledge and using this I think is really one of the best ways to make active recall the most efficient and effective for you as possible bottom line create flashcards from the practice questions you got wrong only create flashcards based on the specific piece of information within the practice question that you didn't understand [Music] tip number seven is when using active recall prioritize broader topics then your incorrect questions and then specific nitty-gritty information I learned this strategy and this is probably one of the best

strategies for learning in medical school because I just had so much information to learn and I didn't know where to start I didn't know what information to learn first and I actually started backwards I started remembering little pieces of information random facts of information before understanding the general concepts of what was going on and that was wrong I got to test aim I remember my first test day of medical school and I was like wait a second they're not asking me to recite these specific fact I just learned they're not asking me to know this

random tiny piece of information they want me to actually understand what's going on the questions were tough they required a deep understanding of the topic to connect facts not just to know random specific facts and I scored like pretty low on that test probably actually my lowest score that I ever got on a medical school test and at that point I knew I needed to switch it up and this is kind of the way this YouTube channel started right I realized okay weight my studying strategies aren't necessarily right there are better strategies there's evidence-based strategies

that work so I switched to understanding first and then knowing the smaller random pieces of information okay so we know we need to understand first but when we use active recall we should also be studying active recall questions practice questions flash cards that are more General too then that get more specific and usually textbooks and practice questions that your teachers give you are formatted in this way the first ones are a little bit easier a little bit more General and then they get harder and more specific the farther you go on so do it in

that order and also make sure as you're answering these harder questions that you understand kind of the basic pieces of information in the question so bottom line test yourself on the broader more General topics before then moving on to the questions that you normally get wrong before then moving on to those specific little pieces of information that might bump your grade like a point or two [Music] finally the last point about using active recall correctly is use the power of spaced repetition to make your active recall stick so instead of doing a flash card one

day and then never doing it again you'll do the flash card one day then maybe three days later then if you get it right maybe six days later then if you get it right again maybe 18 days later that's distributed practice and I cover this idea tons in my other videos I'll link one up here but the idea behind this is when we first learn a piece of information we're going to forget that information very very quickly some studies show that you actually forget 50 of the information you learn within 20 minutes and then a

total of 66 percent of the information the next day so the only way to avoid this loss is to test ourselves at certain intervals spaced repetition Anki is an amazing computerized flash card resource that I use all the time to help combat this but really you just need to make sure you're studying this information at different periods of time you can't just study the information from the beginning of the semester once and hope it's retained for the final exam you need to review that information from the beginning of the semester a couple times throughout the

semester before the final exam if you wanted to stick around for the final exam bottom line is space out your active recall sessions of the same information on your way to the exam so you don't forget that information over time Anki is a great resource for this so I talk a lot about studying but it's because it's what I'm passionate about it's what most of my videos are about I've always wanted to know how I can maximize my time spent studying by using the most efficient study techniques based off the evidence my videos hopefully teach

you how to study better and I've made my most detailed study guide ever on a class I'm calling study smarter not harder that's hosted on nebula class nebula classes is a platform I'm creating with a bunch of other creators going more into my class my class has over 100 sources for a reason I wanted to double triple quadruple check the information to make sure I'm providing you the highest quality information possible I wanted to make a class that I wish I had when I was starting college and this is that class this course covers priming

your brain for the best study session ever which study techniques work and which study techniques don't work and finally I'll tell you how to actually integrate these study techniques into your real life when you sign up using my link for nebio classes you not only get access to my class but you get access to Thomas Frank's class on running a business as a Creator which I watched and it is awesome and the great thing is there's a new class being released every single week finally not only do you get access to tons of classes but

because nebular classes is a part of nebula you also get full access to nebula which is where a bunch of YouTube creators put all their YouTube videos on but completely ad-free some creators like myself also put up exclusive videos so videos you can only see on nebula and I even put all of my YouTube videos up on nebula like one week early so you could watch next week's YouTube video right now on nebula the whole thing is 149 dollars per year but if you sign up up using my special link which is nebulaclasses.com Zach highly

you can get access to it for a hundred and nineteen dollars a year instead so click on the button on screen or click on the link in the description and sign up today and you'll be helping not only me but tons of other creators and you'll get access to some awesome stuff overall active recall is what the best students use worldwide for a reason make sure you're using it right make sure you're efficient and effective and watch your grades go up but that is it thank you so much for watching this video and I will

see you in the next one now a plant pot that's that's that's meant to be your hat right a plant pot [Music]