Study Skills

 
In today’s entry, I want to talk about the videos I have watched and how the information that I have learned can be used for my future reading. 

 
My earlier experience with studying was not particularly good, let me tell you that I was merely lucky that I got on fine in high school. I would study at the last minute and or focus on one subject as I did not even know how to properly study and would try to find study tips on YouTube rather than study. That was until what I discovered in this research to which I will be separating into three separate paragraphs. 

 
In my research, I came across a YouTube channel called Mike and Matty where Mike talks about the three best study tips with scientific evidence. In this, he will tell us how to study for exams, how to train your brain to learn effectively again with the help of science. He mentions that quizzing yourself, “spacing it out” your study time and mixing it up and my interpretation of what he means is that the method of studying one topic and efficiently jumping into another. Those three methods are effective because “it challenges you and use cognitive effort, it’s the struggle that improves your learning and strengthens the connection in your brain” according to Mike. Anyways back to the topic, in the research according to the research of Zachary A. Rosner, Jeremy A. Elman and Arthur P. Shimamura called the generation effect: activating broad neural circuits during memory encoding, it is said that “The generation effect is a robust memory phenomenon in which actively producing material during encoding acts to improve later memory performance. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis, we explored the neural basis of this effect. During encoding, participants generated synonyms from word-fragment cues (e.g., GARBAGE-W_ST_) or read other synonym pairs (e.g., GARBAGE-WASTE). Compared to simply reading target words, generating target words significantly improved later recognition memory performance. During encoding, this benefit was associated with a broad neural network that involved both prefrontal (inferior frontal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus) and posterior cortex (inferior temporal gyrus, lateral occipital cortex, parahippocampal gyrus, ventral posterior parietal cortex). These findings define the prefrontal-posterior cortical dynamics associated with the mnemonic benefits underlying the generation effects. "Meaning that if we study if we use our different parts of the brain then it is most likely that the information you want to retain will be stuck in your head. So, to summarise my point, those three methods are effective because they challenge your brain. 

As for what I feel about reading and writing well, to be honest, they can be hard to do but extremely useful. 

My questions towards active reading are what is it? And how can we use it to study and in the YouTube video by the person called Thomas Frank explained what active reading is and he said that active reading is “a method of reading a book with the intent of pulling something useful out of it” as for how we can use it we can take short notes to summarise the chapter of the book being studied. The method he mentions is called pseudo-skimming. 

As I have no previous experience with media literacy, I have no clue what to say as I have seen the commercials the way it was so no other than that I have nothing else to add. 

Sources:

The 3 best science-based study tips-Mike and Matty

5 Active Reading Strategies for Textbook Assignments - College Info Geek

Creating critical thinkers through media literacy: Andrea Quijada at TEDxABQED

The generation effect: activating broad neural circuits during memory encoding