Check out my new DNA sequencing demo. Read through the instructions, and then just play. Let the learning flow into you.
(And if the applet doesn’t appear in twenty seconds or so, try reloading the page. If that doesn’t work, make sure you’re using an up-to-date browser.)
You’ve read the material, but it doesn’t quite feel like you’ve retained the information. So you reach for your textbook, your lecture notes: another hour of review.
Wait. You’ll retain the information better if you take an extra step before re-opening your textbook. Ask yourself two or three review questions, and try to answer those questions before proceeding. Guess if necessary. People who take the mental effort to try to answer a question before reviewing, even if they get it wrong, can improve their recall by as much as 10% relative to people who just plunge into the reading.
The trick here is not to cheat: don’t ask yourself questions you already know. Ask yourself some review questions from the back of your textbook chapter. Or better yet, study in a group and pass questions around.
After you miss a field-goal kick, you might begin to see field goals as harder to make. And not just in the abstract: people who miss field goals start to perceive the post as being higher and narrower.
Your brain messes with you. Performance failures make you pessimistic, and in very specific ways:
Interestingly, the change in players’ perception didn’t just depend on how many goals they missed — it also mattered how they missed their goals. Folks who failed because they didn’t kick high enough perceived the crossbar to be taller, while those who kicked to the side viewed it as more narrow.
A lot of students are getting their first major exams back this week. To those of you who didn’t do as well as you wanted to, I say this: don’t let your brain psych you out of keeping at it. Learning a scientific discipline is hard enough without having to deal with doubts, fear, and optical illusions.
I told some students I’d find them some cell-cycle/mitosis videos. Enjoy.
And then there’s this.
Almost got it? It’s right on the tip of your tongue? Maybe you should stop trying to remember it, and just look it up.
According to at least one psychology study, the more you spin your wheels, the more your brain learns the spinning instead of what you’re trying to remember.
Filed under: tips | Tags: concept maps, conceptual superstructure, tricks, words words words
Bio students learn a lot of definitions. It’s important and it makes sense: if you want to live in France, it makes sense to know what une baguette is, and if you want to live in Scienceland, you should know what Caenorhabditis elegans is. That does not mean, however, that students should be studying definitions as such.
Think about how scientists learn. Scientists don’t learn new areas of science by studying vocab flashcards. They just see words used in context — in articles, in lectures — and by seeing how they’re used they learn how to use them. Note that I didn’t just write: they learn what those words mean. They learn how to use the words: in what situations, and to get what ideas across.
It might be a subtle difference, but it’s useful. Scientific language is just language, and no one really uses language as simply a set of words and their meanings. Try this: define please, as in , “Please pass the ketchup.” Even if you come up with a good definition, does it convey the role that the word please plays in your daily life?
Now define hydrophobicity. A glossary or dictionary might give you something like, “the property of being water-repellent; tending to repel and not absorb water.” Okay, that definition is correct. It doesn’t, however, tell you much about what kinds of things are hydrophobic, what makes them hydrophobic, or what any of the biochemical consequences are of some molecule being hydrophobic.
A better way of understanding the word would bring up its connections to some other terms — maybe nonpolar, lipid, micelle — and some typical contexts in which the word is useful — like in explaining the importance of some transmembrane transport proteins, describing how protein folding happens, and explaining how surfactants work. Flashcards won’t do any of that. Definitions in isolation don’t help you follow the connections among concepts, and they don’t help you form associations as memory aids.
So what should you do? My favorite trick is to make concept maps. I’ll write more about concept maps in future posts, but here’s the gist:
- Write your concept terms on a piece of paper or (better, especially if you’re studying in a group) a chalkboard. Don’t write in columns and rows; spread them out at random.
- Take one pair of terms and draw an arrow from one term to the other.
- Label that arrow so that the terms and your label-words form a sentence. Example: if your arrow points from nonpolar to hydrophobic, the label should read: …molecules are…. The relationship thus reads: Nonpolar molecules are hydrophobic.
- Draw as many of these labeled arrows as make sense. Not all term-pairs will have sensical relationships, but many, many will.
As you map out the key concepts in a textbook section, you’ll find that you’re clarifying your understanding not only of each concept, but also of how it all fits together.
I have nothing to say about it, except that it’s cool. Golgi on a chip.
