The preferred piece of finding out recommendation I’ve ever give you was the Feynman Approach. Whereas the method itself is just loosely primarily based on Richard Feynman’s practices, the thought of self-explanations took off and have become a finding out meme that has since gone far past my very own viewers.
The fundamental concept for the method is easy:
- Choose an concept you don’t perceive very properly.
- On a clean sheet of paper, write a proof for the thought as in case you are educating it to another person.
- Everytime you get caught, return to the textbook to fill within the gaps in your understanding.
This system was a staple of my finding out throughout my MIT Problem, and I nonetheless have dozens of pages I wrote whereas making an attempt to work by tough ideas in math, physics and programming.
That being stated, there’s numerous nuance in getting the method proper. Listed here are 5 tricks to make self-explanations be just right for you:
1. Apply the method selectively.
The most important criticism in regards to the Feynman method is that it takes an excessive amount of time. A course might cowl a dozen or extra ideas in a single lecture. Writing a pair pages of rationalization for every is extremely time consuming.
Worse, the time spent constructing your summary understanding of an idea is time not spent studying to use it. If you happen to’re reducing out follow in favor of self-explanations, it’s possible you’ll find yourself worse off!
Due to this fact, the primary piece of recommendation I’ve is to use it selectively. I are inclined to depend on self-explanation when:
- I can not efficiently apply an idea to the assigned follow questions,
- The thought doesn’t make sense to me,
- AND I do know the thought is central to understanding the category.
My standard method is to begin with reviewing all of the course materials (lectures and texts) after which to do related follow issues. Solely once I hit an deadlock that I consider is owing to a conceptual misunderstanding does it make sense to speculate the time to do a full self-explanation.
2. Go tight for debugging confusion.
One motive to use self-explanations is to restore a misunderstanding or fill in a spot in your information that’s inflicting confusion.
Sadly, determining exactly what you don’t perceive is commonly half the battle. More often than not, we don’t have a great sense of what’s complicated us; we’re merely confused.
The worth of self-explanation is that by making an attempt to generate the reason your self, in your personal phrases, you’ll invariably hit an deadlock on the weak hyperlink in your understanding. Understanding the place that deadlock is, which hyperlink is weak, offers you the instruments to return to your notes or textbooks, to do a detailed studying, or to articulate good questions you possibly can ask lecturers or friends.
Nonetheless, this solely works in case your rationalization is tight sufficient. If you happen to clarify the idea to your self in broad phrases, you may skip over the lacking hyperlink in your reasoning. You’ll be able to simply persuade your self you perceive one thing with out figuring out or repairing the lacking step in your reasoning.
Thus, for those who’re doing a self-explanation due to a wrestle with a specific downside—begin by explaining that precise downside. If it was a complicated part of a lecture—clarify the complicated part of the lecture. Stepping again and tackling a generic idea can skip over the very particulars it’s essential to perceive.
3. Give attention to large concepts for memorability.
One other use for self-explanations is whenever you principally perceive an concept, however the reasoning feels tough or a bit fuzzy. It feels such as you don’t mechanically “get” the thought, and such as you’ll in all probability overlook it later.
A technique to consider that is to think about that the reason consists of a bunch of various particular person information, steps in reasoning, and psychological simulations. Complicated explanations are these the place the linkages between numerous components haven’t fairly solidified to the purpose the place you possibly can mentally traverse the thought with ease. By making an attempt to generate the reason your self, you reinforce the linkages between the factual propositions and the steps of reasoning that make up the understanding.
After you have the final gist of an understanding, producing analogies, diagrams or examples will be useful. These additional affiliate the concepts within the rationalization with completely different, overlapping explanations, making them simpler to retrieve and stroll by sooner or later.
4. Don’t substitute self-explanations for real follow issues.
Self-explanations will help you focus your consideration, debug a specific lacking hyperlink in your understanding, or elaborate and retrieve information to generate an understanding of a higher-level idea.
Nonetheless, it’s essential to not substitute self-explanations for doing real follow. There are two causes for this:
– First, it’s arduous to get the extent of depth proper for explanations. For arduous lessons, the tendency is to do self-explanations that don’t go deep sufficient, thus skipping over misunderstandings (even with deliberate effort to keep away from this). Doing follow issues helps you calibrate how deeply it’s essential to perceive an concept.
– Second, studying to determine downside sorts and customary answer steps or approaches depends on completely different information than producing an total rationalization does. Because the information wanted to, say, clarify Kirchhoff’s legal guidelines solely partially overlaps with the procedural information wanted to resolve for the output of a circuit diagram, switch from one to the opposite will solely be partial. Due to this fact, if the intention is to cross an examination, omitting follow questions that resemble these on the take a look at is unwise.
Self-explanations primarily assist when:
- You hit an deadlock along with your follow, owing to a confusion or misunderstanding.
- Follow issues are restricted or overly slim. If the issues don’t cowl the total house of potential functions for an concept, creating a deeper illustration of the underlying ideas could also be useful.
5. Hunt down different explanations to fill lacking items.
Usually, shut studying and cautious reasoning can fill gaps in misunderstanding with out resorting to new supplies. Often, the problem is solely that you just missed an essential step in reasoning within the first cross, leading to confusion.
Nonetheless, this isn’t all the time the case. Generally a trainer assumes a vital reality or step is apparent and omits it from their rationalization, regardless that it could be crucial for making the proper inference. In different instances, an concept is alluded to, however for those who haven’t mastered that concept, the reason as a complete doesn’t make sense to you.
Understanding the place precisely the gaps are in your understanding makes it simple to hunt new explanations. Some good methods embrace:
- If the idea disregarded was a prerequisite you haven’t mastered, discovering a Khan Academy or on-line video that explains that idea might assist.
- If the reasoning between two steps isn’t clear, strive discovering one other rationalization of the identical idea. Completely different lecturers will skip over completely different information, so protection from a number of explanations is healthier than one.
Whereas I haven’t used it as extensively myself, instruments like ChatGPT additionally appear highly effective on this regard. As a result of you possibly can copy and paste the textual content of what you’re making an attempt to know and request a abstract or rationalization, LLMs could possibly supply helpful explanations of steps you missed. In fact, as with all AI-based software program, there’ll typically be hallucinations—nevertheless it’s typically simpler to confirm whether or not a single lacking step of reasoning suits.
Train to Study
Though I don’t take practically as many formal lessons as I used to as a pupil, self-explanations are nonetheless the majority of my work—writing for a dwelling requires me to make sense of newly discovered info so I can embrace it in my essays. Because the saying goes, “Those that know, do. Those that perceive, train.”
