Need to learn? Try teaching!

As a graduate student who came right from undergrad, right after getting out of high school, I've been going to school for the past 18 years. Straight. I'm only 22.

And in those 18 years, you would have thought that I nailed the whole "studying" thing. If only!

Over the course of the semester, we've learned about attention fatigue, distractions, and attention restoration. All of these, of course, go into reasons why a student may not be able to focus very well in studying. Especially now, in a time where "multitasking" is encouraged and Facebook is only a moment's notice away, distractions are almost constantly there to pull you out of your pile of flashcards.

So, yeah, it's pretty hard to study on your own these days. What's the solution, then?

One of the best ways to study is actually to teach other people. I've experienced this myself and it is the only study method I can endorse with complete confidence. As an undergrad, I was a mathematics tutor. Nearly every day, I'd sit down with someone and help them out with material that I'd already gone over - but in my higher level math classes, when those really specific concepts came back up, my peers would be floundering to remember that law from Calculus II that they learned two years ago -- but I would know it nearly right away! I wish I could take all of the credit and say I had a perfect memory, but really, it was all thanks to tutoring.

I believe it lies in line with some of the more recent material: internal representation. While we've mostly applied it to objects, I believe this is true for ideas/concepts.

Hear me out. There are three key things when forming internal representations: repetition, recognition, and certainty. Teaching other people hits all of these things.

First, there's repetition - the simple first layer. I not only learned the material myself, but every time I had to teach someone, we had to go over the material again. The neurons in my brain that were "assigned" the role of knowing how to 'integrate by parts' were exercised over and over again. Kind of like muscles, those neural connections can atrophy and fade away, meaning that if I hadn't gotten the chance to review it over and over, I wouldn't be able to remember how to integrate by parts, because those neural connections just weren't there anymore.

Teaching really gets the chance to shine when it comes to the other two: recognition and certainty. Recognition applies because I got to see these techniques (ranging from simple algebra to 3D calculus) in many different ways across many different assignments. When deciding the best "plan of attack" for solving an equation, I got better and better at recognizing when to use what mathematical technique.

In addition, teaching is probably one of the places where you'll get the craziest questions that you never expected. Or, a student won't get a concept that you've gone over three times and you have to figure out a way to help them understand. Both of these instances requires you to create some new connection in your own brain, which strengthens your neural map of the concept. Sometimes, you need to get pretty creative, too - even if the material makes sense to you, as the tutor, in one way, the person you're teaching has a completely different set of internal representations and neural maps. You have to expand your map to help reinforce (or in some cases, create...) theirs!

Certainty comes into play when dealing with what you've recognized. With objects, it's supposed to help you see salient features of an object (ex: an elephant is big, gray, has a trunk, big ears) and with mathematical equations it's the same thing. Even if the numbers, variables, or operations change, you can still be certain that the technique you chose is the way to go because of the structure of the problem.

Another thing that I think influences the power of teaching (though this is speculation on my part, I'm hoping to learn more about this idea in later lectures) is the social pressure. If someone is coming to you for help, they're expecting you to know what you're talking about. If you keep getting things wrong, they're not going to trust you, and they'll probably be pretty upset with you.

While my example was about my experience as a math tutor, I'm confident this can expand into almost any topic there is out there.

So maybe instead of pouring over the same chapter twenty times, sit your friend down and try to teach them about the things you're learning in class. Preferably, try to pick someone who might owe you a favor, so you can ramble on about directed attention fatigue and internal representations all night long!