IPHY 3410

Instructor: Dr. Leif Saul
Fall 2023

How to Learn the Slides

Last updated 10/3/2023

The average midterm requires learning about 124 slides, and you have about 3 weeks to learn them. So, to stay on track without cramming at the end, you will need to learn about 6 slides per day.

  1. Start with the first slide (or perhaps the first two or three slides, if they form a coherent group).
  2. Read the slide, aiming to understand it. Consider:
    1. How does it fit within the context of the topic (i.e. the set of powerpoint slides that it belongs to)? Look at the outline slide to help you with this.
    2. Does the slide connect back to earlier material in the course?
    3. Is anything unclear? If so, read the corresponding section in the textbook (and/or in some cases, there may be supplementary reading provided on Canvas).
  3. Put the slide away and pull out a whiteboard, or a piece of scratch paper.
  4. Try to write out the whole slide, word for word. Don't stop or peek until you have completely finished. If you are unsure about any of the details, then take your best guess, as long as you have some idea. But don't waste more than a few seconds struggling to remember any of the bullet points.
  5. Open up the slide again and compare with what you have written.
    1. What parts did you get right? Notice what's easy or logical about those sections. A lot of the material doesn't need to be strictly "memorized", if it's fairly obvious and makes sense.
    2. What parts did you get wrong? Try to understand the cause of any mistakes.
      1. Did you confuse similar-sounding terms? If so, make a note for the future. Maybe add a little highlight box to your notes about this, so you will not make the same mistake again.
      2. Were you unable to construct a term correctly by heart? If so, try to break the term down into meaningful word roots, and it should become easier to remember.
      3. Did you omit some bullet points or items? For lists that may seem open-ended (like a list of functions), it may help you to memorize the number of items. That will help you keep track of whether you're missing any items.
      4. If you've struggled several times to remember an item or group of items, consider creating a mnemonic for yourself. For example, you can take a series of terms (dura mater, arachnoid mater, pia mater) and use the initial letters as a mnemonic ("DAP").
      5. But in all cases, you should be looking for ways that the slide makes sense. The more it makes sense, the less memorization burden it will impose on your brain. Use the textbook, TAs/instructor to help understand why it makes sense and this should improve your understanding, and thus your ability to remember the details.
  6. Repeat step 4. Hopefully you can remember the slide better, now that you have gone through the thought process in step 5.You should continually assess how things are going:
    1. If it seems like it takes too much effort, you're probably biting off too much material at a time. Try learning half a slide at a time, or a single bullet point at a time.
    2. If, on the other hand, you feel like you're wasting your time repeating information that is obvious and easy to remember, then try learning bigger chunks of information all at once (e.g. two or more slides at a time that go together as a coherent group).
  7. Once you've memorized a slide (or group of slides or portion of a slide), move on to the next unit of information (e.g. the next slide), and repeat steps 2-6.
  8. If you start memorizing at the first slide and continue to the last slide in this fashion, then by the time you get to the end, you will definitely forget much, or most, of the earlier slides! To retain the information in the long term, you'll need to periodically review the earlier slides.
    1. Allocate the first part of each study session to learning (memorizing) new material that you haven't previously learned, and the second part to reviewing earlier material that you've already learned.
      1. As you get closer to the exam, more and more of your time should be spent on review. If you are a couple days from the exam, and you are still learning some of the material for the first time, then you have failed to schedule your learning in a way that will ensure success on the exam. Make a note to start earlier, study more per day, and stick more closely to your schedule, for future exams.
    2. How do you decide what material to review? There are various ways to do this:
      1. You can just skim through the different slide sets and subjectively pick a topic that it feels like you are starting to forget.
      2. You can keep track of the last time you reviewed a subtopic by writing the date of last review next to the subtopic, where it's listed on the outline slide. This can help you identify what subtopics you haven't reviewed in a while.
      3. You can use a technique called spaced repetition that tries to maximize learning and retention based on the psychology of how learning works. Here is a brief introduction to the technique and some of the available software. Note: Many descriptions and implementations of spaced repetition assume the student is learning by flash cards. As I've mentioned on the Exam Tips page, there are limitations to the usefulness of flash cards, and they're not sufficient to fully prepare you for exams in this course. Personally I would substitute "slide" for "flash card" if I were going to implement spaced repetition in this course, and I would be sure to include review of integrative aspects of the material (mentioned above in steps 2a-c).
        • Caution: Any time you adopt a new technology or "learning system", there is a risk of cluttering or "over-organizing" the learning process. Your time is limited and best spent studying and self-testing (recalling) the bullet points. Any other activity (making flash cards, learning new software, entering bullet points into the software, etc.) is time that probably could have been better spent simply writing out the slides.

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