Study More Efficiently With These 2 Basic Steps

Learn about how to maximise encoding efficiency.

Every week, I distil what really works for improving results, memory, depth of understanding, and knowledge application from over a decade of coaching into bite-sized emails.

=== Paid Training Program ===

(Designed for busy students and professionals aiming to achieve top results without endless studying. 77% of our students cover the same amount of study material in 30% less time within 1 month.)

=== Notes ===

Sorry for the long video but this is important. Maybe one of the most important study skills videos I've made. Active recall and spaced repetition are effective techniques, but relying on them is not going to work out for the majority of students. If your problems aren't with retrieval then it's an uphill battle that you will lose eventually.

If you search for "study skills" or "how to study faster" or listen to the advice of many study gurus, they will put active recall and spaced repetition on a pedestal. As someone who has gone through all of that, and worked with thousands of students in real practice, I can tell you that this is not even half of the full story. I hope you learn something new and see things differently.

With the "PROBLEM with active recall and spaced repetition" video made and now this one about the very fundamentals of encoding, the next videos will focus on going through examples and specific techniques. In those future videos, I will just refer to these 2 videos instead of explaining everything all over again.

Watch the PROBLEM with active recall and spaced repetition video here:

If you enjoyed what I had to give or found it valuable, a subscribe would be sincerely appreciated.

=== About Dr Justin Sung ===

Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, certified teacher, research author, and former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.

[JustinSung]

Every week, I distil what really works for improving results, memory, depth of understanding, and knowledge application from over a decade of coaching into bite-sized emails.

[haruhidaso]

I'm a physics PhD student, but if you cannot do this, you just would not survive doing physics. The professors are typically experts in what they are teaching, and you would notice that they are trying to build the big picture for you during class. At this point, I have not taken any notes in over 2-3 years, and I just listen to professor and try to understand the map that the professors are trying to create for you.
Then, I typically just jump straight into homework, and try to do it. At this point, you notice that you are missing part of the big picture and cannot answer questions, so you go back to textbook/lecture notes to fill in that gap. 9 times out of 10 you still have significant holes or missing connections between the patches of understanding/knowledge you have, so go to the office hour and ask for help from your professor to connect the dots.
Added benefit is that you get close to your professors so you already got your recommendation letter set if you ever need one.
This method really helps because going to class is really easy, you just sit there and listen, so you have a lot of energy left at the end of the day to tackle the homework with full attention.

[elliesaksena]

Summary:

In this video, Sung broke down the two steps to effective encoding: higher-order learning and increasing memory tolerance. First, we analyzed higher-order learning which can be visualized with a taxonomy of processing ideas and concepts. The lower order learning skills involve techniques of learning that don't connect new content to known concepts and information. We can skip lower-order learning and go right to higher-order learning, looking at the big picture and the lower-order learning concepts will fill in almost automatically. Higher-order learning sets up an organizational system to allow information to be processed and remembered. The levels of higher-order learning include applying, analyze and evaluating. Apply is interpretation, sketching where the concept fits, analyze is comparing and contrasting other concepts and facts to new information, and evaluate is discriminating which connections between concepts are the most important.

Increasing memory tolerance is also important in the encoding process. A key mistake many people make is consuming information individually or committing information into notes prematurely. One consumes information individually if they try learning pieces of information before a higher-order learning organization has been established. This disadvantages one from the start and frequently means reorganization and encoding will be required to learn the concepts. Additionally, we should not commit information into notes before our mind has processed, sorted, and organized the information. This involves asking 2 questions before taking a note: how does this relate to what I learned, how does this fit into the big picture?

By emphasizing higher-order learning and working on increasing memory tolerance, we can more effectively encode and learn concepts and information.

[HarishPentapalli]

1. Basic principles of encoding
Takes 1-3 months at max.
Orders of Learning: Higher-order, Lower-order
See Bloom's Taxonomy. Create -> Evaluate -> Analyze -> Apply -> Understand -> Remember. Get to higher order as early as possible.

2. Increasing cognitive load tolerance
a) If you tend to write lots of notes, get into the habit of holding onto it for a little longer in your head before writing it down.
b) Then consume a little bit more information, process this and ask questions like "how does this relate to what I learned?" and "how does this fit into the big picture?"

If you're not proficient with higher order learning, this may be overwhelming and lead to excessive confusion. For these cases, start with slightly lower - order learning and work upwards

[sovereignknight]

This is amazing. No other youtuber comes close to your expertise when it comes to actually learning information efficiently and effectively. Everyone just regurgitates the same stuff of doing "active recall and spaced repepition". Thank you so much for creating this video.

[stomorevs]

The way I like to learn:

I jump straight to practice problems. Even if I don’t know anything about the subject, being quizzed on a topic automatically reveals to me what is important to know. I immediately begin filling in gaps in my knowledge to help me answer the practice problems. To fill in the gaps I read lecture slides, google stuff, and jot down important points. When I’ve exhausted one set of practice problems, I try to find another set. I like the challenge of trying to answer questions. Just memorizing stuff bores me!!

[patrickm]

Justin’s idea of focusing on upper levels of thinking is spot on. I apply it consistently with a piece of advice my uni professor once shared to us, and the results are unbelievable! A professor once told us that when reading any given chapter of a topic in a textbook, it is best practice to read the objectives and also the summary of that chapter before diving into its core of the chapter. This triggers the high levels of learning Justin is talking about. It works folks!

[JustinSung]

I'm focusing on writing up the full research report at the moment because there were a surprising number of people that were interested! So that should hopefully be up in a week or so. There are about 400 references to go through so it is taking some time to organise it all. I've previously only had this information collated non-sequentially so putting it into a single... reasonably concise report is proving quite a challenge. Will be done soon though :)

[alexhaluska]

I’m someone who has always naturally been good at school and testing and you have finally revealed to me why. I am always trying to figure out where a new piece of information fits in with what I already know. And now that I am aware of this, I am excited to deliberately apply this to my ongoing studying!

[grimmsnow]

I would love to try this out. However, we need to always remember the context and learning environment students are exposed to. The reason why active recall is widely used is because it's what the education system wants us to do. Tests are more about remembering than connecting, with the exception of problem-solving. Other than that, most of the tests we go through look at how we recall specific terms, definitions, dates, figures, etc. Combine this with a VERY rushed curriculum that feels like you never stop getting new material to read, then you could understand why so many learn so little.

[FreshApplePie]

Hello, I'm an Artist and I just want to talk about some of the things in this video from the perspective of someone who does creative work, in case anyone wanted to know how these things might work for less "academic" pursuits. One of the main things I was pleased to hear is just how many parallels I could draw from the artist's idea of a "visual library", which is basically what we would call the long-term memory, but for visual stimuli.

Character design is something I often get asked about, and there's a lot of reasons why character design is difficult. How do you create something from scratch? So this is where the visual library comes in, because if you have a large visual library, then it shouldn't be difficult to not only come up with ideas, but to compare ideas and even combine ideas that might seem strange at first, and forcing them to belong together in an aesthetically pleasing way.

A novice illustrator might ask, "how do I draw X?", well, you need reference. This would essentially be the learning material you encode and use, and one of the neat things about illustration is you typically try to apply what you see as soon as you can, you look at the reference and you attempt to draw it, trying to transfer visual information by your own two hands, and not only that, but applying it to perhaps a new environment or alternative use, like a piece of clothing for a character.

For example, and especially for character design, you could say "well, what if the front bumper for this car was a jacket?" and forcing that kind of association in an attempt to marry it into a visually appealing design is probably one of the best things you could do for trying to remember the important aspects of it's design; you pay attention to the details, what aspects of the front bumper are visually interesting enough to keep? which details are sacrificial? what makes these shapes interesting? This kind of thinking not only forces you to make creative decisions, but they are also decisions unique to you that you are trying to justify for the sake of design. This is a ridiculous example, but it's exactly the kind of thinking that is rewarded in something as esoteric in the wider field of illustration as character design.

You can't do this without growing your visual library, or at least you wouldn't be able to do it as well as someone who does. Sure, you can draw a camera and learn what a camera looks like, but in the wider context of design, what could the camera also look like? You don't have to compare it to just other cameras, what if the camera was shaped like a bird? how about the colors of an exotic bird, would that look good on a camera? Would this camera be a character's head? Again, these are the sorts of creative visual/mental links that people in visual design fields would come up with despite the objects or references being completely unrelated to each other, and is how design in general expands.

One thing I like to remind people who come to me for advice is that "everything is inspired by something", and what I mean by this is that nothing in the world exists that hasn't been seen by human eyes at some point, and while you could say "well this thing doesn't exist" doesn't mean it isn't in some way a mishmash of the totality of every piece of visually inspiring thing the designer had come across throughout their entire lifetime. All of this, in my opinion, very much fits with this idea that taking a concept, reproducing it visually, applying it to your own work in a novel way by combining it with other ideas and therefore creating something new, makes illustration a very hands-on approach as an example of how the information in this video can be directly applied in the real world.

Every time you're looking at reference to create something new, means that you are in that higher level of thinking, and the more you do this the more you get better at things, even looking at reference, you eventually begin to understand which design elements are more significant to the aesthetic appeal, and you can be sure that the very best artists and designers will be people who are very good at deconstructing design and reconstituting it as a part of a different, bigger picture. On some level, you could probably replace a lot of the words in this video and it would be very good advice for design students. Thank you for this content.

[ifetube]

After watching this video. I genuinely feel like i owe u a few hundred bucks.

Over a few years of trying to improve my study methods (i can absorb quickly but been trying to spend lesser time), I've subconsciously noticed most of the flaws in the popular methods that you highlighted here. So it seems like my soul found what it's been seeking.

Great job you did here! 🙌

[TirianSoverign]

I've always struggled with learning, because I start with isolated pieces of information about a given subject and try to mold them into an efficient system for gaining proficiency in said subject. I've quite literally spent hours upon hours trying to understand how to learn so I can fuel my thirst for practical knowledge, which is ironic. So far, the information and insight you've provided is second to none. You've given me a new perspective on how to learn, and for that I thank you. I just subscribed, and I'm looking forward to future content. Keep up the good work!

[jletsgoo]

5:40 apply+!
6:40 analyse: compare w other ideas
7:00 evaluate: judging/prioritising concepts 7:15 synoptic links
8:20 encoding: higher order learning
relating info to each other + the bigger picture!
9:30 how to get the bigger picture without understanding: u cant, but higher order will allow ur brain to get it along the way
10:35 🕐 11:30
12:00 summary 12:40 relations

[azncedric]

Overall I think your videos are revolutionary- witness me who's turned a 6 hour textbook chapter read into a 2 hour textbook chapter read with 10 times the amount of understanding and retention I previously had.

It's a real shame, how other than 2 viral videos, how little exposure Justin's videos have to the public. I cannot put to words the tremendous amount of stress and the unfathomable amount of productivity his videos have brought to my life, and I only wish the same situation to millions of other struggling students scouring youtube for study enlightenment. Its a true miracle that I stumbled upon this channel.

I will forever root for the growth of your channel, Justin. You definitely deserve it, and its a real injustice how you don't have the channel attention that you irrefutably deserve.

[bobbyjoefit]

Simply put. Keep thinking about the information you're trying to learn after the lesson is over. Connect the info. Relate it to something bigger or something in your life. Figure out how to use it and create with it. I think when we create things we have a fundamental understanding of said items and how they "play" with each other.

[SHInangli]

Effective Encoding
(Notes for myself)

— Higher order learning
(NOTE: GO THROUGH HIGHER ORDER LEARNING, skip lower order learning)
Analyzing - Relating a idea to another one or multiple ideas, comparing and contrasting. Seeing the relationship between all of this ideas to each other.
Evaluating - How we can judge them, how we can prioritize them. What's the nature of the relationship, how important it is to the big picture.
Which = Learning outcome shows are made and parts are synthesised with the overall meaning.

To engage higher order learning - create more efficiently encoding, ALWAYS relate info to each other and to the bigger picture

— increasing memory tolerance
If u tend to write lots of notes, get into the habit of holding on it for a whilein your head before actually writing it down (this is very helpful tbh)
Then consume a little more info and ask yourself "how does this relate to what i've learned?" "How does this fit to bugger picture?"

Some important keypoints Sung said in this video.

[agapic]

I remember I had 14 days for upcoming hard test for Saudi Aramco company, and it was about high level of algebra and calculus, so what I did that I took a big board and everything I learn I would make like a mind map and I would just try to connect every concepts with my mind at the end of the day I will do the same on the board, eventually I was able to teach myself all of the lessons in a short amount of time, and did REALLY GREAT in the exam. I just remembered also that I did the comparing and constricting in Geology and got full mark

Thank you for the video I will start doing it again

[aliiiccyee]

It's exactly what I need!!!! For all these years, I've been just remembering and forgetting, by the time exam strikes, I basically have to study Everything for every subject all over again within a few days. And throw them all away after the exams are finished. I have been wondering how, and what I should do to make what I've learned and remembered to stay in my head. Please upload more videos on encoding, I have feeling it's going to change my life

[ananyabj]

Seriously you are like the door of light to several student who are told
" Once you understand you never forget, you don't understand the concept that is why you are forgetting "
Like my parents say that and a doctor said the same to me