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.
Filed under: in the news, tips | Tags: memory, neurophysiology, reading, tricks, working memory
You’re reading through your textbook, and all seems to be going well. Every sentence makes perfect sense. Definitions, mechanisms, and relationships are all crystal-clear. Then a minute after you get to the end of the paragraph, you try to summarize what you’ve read. Nothing happens. What made perfect sense a minute ago now seems as lost a dream. What happened?
Try this experiment. Stand in a crowd and watch for someone to look at her watch. Wait a few seconds, approach, and ask what time it is. She’ll almost certainly have to look at her watch again before telling you, even though the time won’t have changed much since the first time she looked.
When we look at a watch, the information goes into what psychologists call working memory, where we use it to figure out what we’re really interested in: how much time there is until the meeting or train or dinner reservation. Similarly, when we read a textbook or article — especially when we’re just reading it passively instead of interrogating it — frequently the information just goes into working memory. The definitions and whatnot just go to making everything make sense. Then after our brains confirm that it all makes sense, they dispose of the information.
Working memory is different from short-term memory (which I’ll write about some other time): it’s not so much information storage as it is the active manipulation and use of information. It doesn’t hold much (maybe seven separate things), it lasts just several seconds, and it seems to disappear in a flash.
How do you put what you read into real, instead of working, memory? Don’t simply read. When you read, ask more of your reading than simply for it to make sense. Ask your text questions, and read to answer those questions. Set up a blank worksheet for definitions, structures, and functions, and read to fill in that worksheet. Read a paragraph at a time, and summarize each paragraph immediately after reading it. Do whatever you need to do to avoid reading entire chapters at a time, spending enormous blocks of time bouncing words off your eyeballs. Read deliberately, dare I say mindfully.
I’ll be posting sporadically this week because I’m teaching a brand-new series of study-skills workshops. (CCP people — look for flyers in the West Learning Lab, W3-26.) The first workshop is on how to use the textbook, and I thought I’d describe my favorite book trick: reading the book like you’re reading a mystery novel. (I learned this trick and many others from my colleagues, Jay Howard and Joan Monroe, in CCP’s Learning Lab.)
The trick starts with noting that modern science textbooks’ section and subsection headers are usually complete sentences. There’s a gen-bio book in front of me, and flipping to random pages gives me gems like Molecular clocks help assign dates to evolutionary events and The vascular cambium produces xylem and phloem in woody plants. Note that these are subsection headers — titles of parts of the book — not the paragraphs of the main text. You could probably get half the information of the book just by reading headers.
Here’s the trick: Read a header and ask two or three questions about it. If the header is Comnparing anatomical parts can reveal evolutionary relationships, your questions might be: Which parts? What do they reveal about evolutionary relationships? How do you do the comparison? How reliable? If the header is Organelles act to secrete substances, you might ask: Which organelles? What substances? What’s an organelle, anyway?
Flip through your textbook at random. Find headers and ask questions. Most of the time your question will be What is an X? That’s fine: much of biology is about naming and understanding objects and processes. As you gain experience learning biology, though, your questions will become more sophisticated. You’ll start asking things like: What are the monomers? How is that regulated? Are there developmental constraints? You’ll start to ask the kinds of questions that inspire entire research programs.
Anyway, when you open your textbook to study, read the headings and write down the questions. Then read the section with those questions in mind. Read the section with the goal of answering the questions. Don’t treat the textbook like a spy thriller, which you read to find out what happens. Read it like a murder mystery, which you read in order to solve the crime before the detective does.
When you read a mystery, you interact with the narrative in a more engaged way. You say to the detective, “Don’t trust that witness. He’s shifty!” Or, “Why aren’t you noticing the fact that the victim is just five feet tall?” You ask questions, you test assumptions, you give no character or description the benefit of the doubt.
Do the same thing with your textbook. And then, after you read each section, summarize it in the margins. Take notes on what you read.
Do these things, and I assure you that you’ll retain more information, that you’ll doze off less at the library, that you’ll do better on exams, and that you’ll be thinking more like a scientist.
