May 16th, 2012 Pause-Repeat Your Way to A New Career
Are you yearning for a new career, or just to move up in your current field, but find yourself intimidated or downright frozen by the thought of taking a required class or passing a qualifying exam?
You may be avoiding the classes that will help you make a desired career change because you have trouble remembering and retaining things that you have learned. If so, then B. Price Kerfoot, an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, has a new method of learning that you may want to try.
The method is called spaced repetition. The theory behind it is that our memory of a piece of information, the first time we encounter it, tends to be fleeting and unpredictable. However, over a period of time, as we re-encounter the information, our memory of the information grows stronger and more reliable.
The secret of the method is to have spacing between the contacts with the information and to keep the information concise. Dr. Kerfoot developed a system of delivering weekly emails to his students with brief sentences of review material mixed with new material for the students to review. The students in his studies scored significantly higher on tests than students who did not receive the weekly emails.
In fact, Dr. Kerfoot found that cramming for an exam the night before was of little use since not much of the information was retained.
How can you try this method? If there is something you need to learn, then review the material and create a series of brief reviews and synopsis. Once a week, study the reviews and the bits of new material. Repeat until you have covered all the material while at the same time reviewing the material you have already learned. Dr. Kerfoot found that putting the review material in the form of questions or quizzes was very effective.
Of course this method is not just for classes and exams. Try it with anything you’d like to learn … names, constellations, stock trading, …. even dance steps. Oh la la! Now that’s better.
Here is a link to the related article The New Way Doctors Learn at time.com.
