How the Top 4 Science-backed Methods of Learning Rocketed this Struggling Student to the Top of His Class

How the Top 4 Science-backed Methods of Learning Rocketed this Struggling Student to the Top of His Class

Imagine if you too now applied these 4 methods.

Georgia, 2011

In 2011, Michael Young enrolled at the Medical College of Georgia to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor. There was only one problem: he didn’t have the pre-med coursework, so he was woefully unprepared and unqualified. 

Young was a psychologist working as a drug-addiction counselor when he began to team up with doctors. When he watched the doctors work, he got the sinking feeling he had missed his calling. He felt the tug to do more with his life, and the feeling wouldn’t leave him. He wanted to be a doctor. 

So he looked into the pre-med courses he could take at his local college in Columbus, Georgia, and that’s when he got his first shock. They laughed. They said not a single student from their college had gone on to medical school in more than ten years.

Young marched on undeterred. He put together the closest things he could find to pre-med courses. When they said there was no biology course available, Young had to settle for the next best thing, which was, believe it or not, a course in fishing. 

He then crammed for the Medical College Admission Test, somehow scored just above the bare minimum, and to his delight and surprise got himself into Georgia’s top medical school, the Medical College of Georgia. 

And that’s when the hard part really began. 

In his first week of classes at the 200-year-old institution, he was already overwhelmed. By his count, in a single day of classes the instructors presented about 400 Powerpoint slides. And the slides were dense with information. Young didn’t need advanced math to realize that meant about 2000 slides of detailed information every week. 

The Old Ways Just Didn’t Work

Like most students, Michael approached his challenge with the study techniques were all once taught: do the readings, read quickly to get them all done, take copious notes, re-read and highlight, memorize stuff, put in crazy hours, and cram, cram, cram for those tests, tests, tests. 

But by the time Michael got back his first test results, he was devastated. He had given everything he had, and all he scored was a 65. 

After the initial panic, he decided there had to be a better way. He knew something had to change. There just weren’t more hours in the day. He was already stressed out. If something didn’t change, perhaps dropping out would be the only solution. 

That’s when Michael decided to explore an area of science that most students still haven’t even heard of: the science of learning.  

Reaching Out to the Experts

Michael was all too familiar with the usual study tips, but found they were mostly just people’s opinions. They were a dime a dozen. 

He wanted science-backed solutions on what actually works, and when he came across new studies in the academic journals, he was intrigued. Their findings were radically different from much of the usual stuff on how to study. 

That’s when he decided to reach out to the experts themselves. 

He sent an email to Henry Roediger, a professor of cognitive science at Washington University in St. Louis, and one of the country’s top researchers in the science of learning. And fortunately for Michael, he got a whole lot more than he expected. 

Roediger and his team of researchers struck up a relationship with Michael, and they gave him the detailed advice he had hoped for. 

Most important of all, they told Michael that what he was doing wrong was not his fault. Roediger said most students still study in the wrong ways. The research, he said, is clear on this.

The Advice Was Different, Strange, and Counterintuitive; but Michael Was Out of Alternatives 

At first, Michael found the new advice unusual and hard to digest. It was not how he had been taught to learn or study. He had been taught to read everything, and then re-read. He had long thought the only solution was just to put in long hours.

But that was how virtually everyone has been taught, and it not only doesn’t work well, it can lead to overwhelm and burnout. 

The new advice, on the whole, consisted of four basic methods.

They advised that the first step was to become proactive in his learning – proactive in what he chose to learn. Next, they said he should slow down, not speed up – despite what the popular writing says about so-called speed reading. Instead, they said, you need to slow down, and ‘elaborate’ on what you’ve decided is most important. Then, they said, you need to ‘test yourself,’ and do that often. And finally, they advised, he needed to ‘space out his learning’ over time. In other words, the very opposite of cramming. 

4 Basic Methods

All in all, that package of advice can be summed up as these 4 Methods: 

Method 1: Be Proactive in How You Approach Your Learning

Method 2: Engage with the Material – through techniques like Elaboration, Generation, and Own-words Summaries.

Method 3: Test yourself – Engage in Retrieval Practice.

Method 4: Space Your Learning and Practice over Time – to Consolidate It into Deeper, Long-term Memory

Applying the New Advice, and Getting Past the Hard Part

Initially, the advice left Michael with a host of mixed emotions. It was all new and different from what he had always done, but Young had no choice but to give it a try. There just weren’t more hours in the day, and his old methods of reading everything, then re-reading and cramming for tests, wasn’t working. 

So he got to work and made big changes. 

He became highly proactive in deciding what was important and what was not (Method 1). 

He applied techniques to develop his own understanding of a new concept (Method 2). 

Then he organized ways to test if he knew something (Method 3). 

And, finally, he organized himself so that his efforts were spaced out over regular intervals (Method 4). 

Did it work?

For the first month, it all felt uncomfortable. To sustain his motivation, Michael resolved to trust the process. After all, the advice and methods were, like medicine itself, based on science.  

After the first few months, the good news began to arrive. His scores improved. His marks kept rising. 

By the end of first year, he had moved from the bottom of the class to the top. 

To his own surprise, his new success had even attracted attention of the professors, and Michael was selected as as a top student who could tutor other med students.

By his fourth year, he was regularly tutoring other students, including in the methods he himself had used. 

By the end of that year, in May 2015, Michael graduated from the Medical College of Georgia – near the top of his class. 

And the biggest pay off of all was a new career in the field he had once only dreamed about: today, Michael now has a thriving practice in Florida in family medicine.

So yes, it worked. And one of the clear reasons it worked is that these top 4 Methods have now been solidly proven in the science of learning to be the core methods of how we learn best. 

The Science of How We Learn

The science of learning now draws on 20+ years of research in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence and the education sciences. While that list alone can make it seem like a complex field to say the least, the essence of how we learn can also be simplified when distilled down to the essential advances.

Earlier this year, neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene did just that, in his bestselling book How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better than Any Machine — For Now.[efn_note]

Stanislas Dehaene, How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better than Any Machine — For Now (New York: Viking, 2020). Note that the English edition is published in the UK under the title How We Learn: The New Science of Education and the Brain.[/efn_note]

After spending nine years leading his own lab’s research and combing through hundreds of studies from the past thirty years, Dehaene sets out science’s very consistent conclusion: every human brain follows the exact same “learning algorithm,” and it can be summed up as four core processes, or what Dehaene called “four pillars of learning.” 

Those “four pillars” are: attention, engagement, feedback and consolidation, as shown in this basic graphic: 
 

Simply put, all learning involves these four core processes. 

“Attention” is the grand starting point: your brain doesn’t learn anything unless you’re first paying attention to it. 

“Engagement,” broadly speaking, means actively working on, thinking about or wrestling with the new material. Just reading the material is passive. Instead, reading something and then preparing your own summary, in your own words, and coming up with your own example is active and amounts to Engagement. As Dehaene writes, “a passive organism learns almost nothing” – a finding confirmed over and over again in the studies.

“Feedback,” contrary to conventional thinking, is the mandatory  process that’s central to truly advancing in one’s learning. The human brain is constantly seeking to identify errors and correct for them. Yes – and Dehaene is adamant on this – our education system has made colossal mistakes by stigmatizing students when they make mistakes. 

Lastly, “Consolidation” refers to the extraordinary process of how initial learning turns into deeper long-term memory, but only if this part of the learning and practicing is properly spaced over time. Yes, cramming is one of the dumbest things you can do. 

These four pillars of learning are precisely why Henry Roediger and his team were so adamant about the 4 core methods of learning they advised Michael Young to embrace and adopt. 

That clear alignment between what the neuroscience shows and what we can now advise as the top methods of learning is a big step forward in the science. 

As many people have found, it’s one thing to tell a teacher or a student that we now have all these deep insights into how the brain works, but it’s another thing to figure out what you should change in practice. 

“The neuroscience is certainly interesting,” they’ll say, for example, “but what should I now do differently?” 

We now have the clarity to answer that question, and the best way to sum up what you should now do in practice is follow the same 4 core methods that Michael Young did.
 

The Science-backed Methods of How We Learn Best 

In this graphic, you can see that the advice Henry Roediger and this team gave to Michael Young was completely aligned with the underlying science, or what we can now call the four pillars of learning: 

Here’s a quick overview of how each Method activates the underlying core process in learning.

Summary

If just four basic overall methods sounds relatively simple, it is. You can use this graphic as a handy visual reminder of the basics:

By keeping the overall model simple, it becomes a helpful reminder that the same overall learning process is at play all the time. But that doesn’t make it easy.

Simple. But Not Easy: It Requires a Shift in Thinking 

While the basic four-part process is refreshingly simple, there’s still a big challenge: It requires you to accept that you likely need to make a big shift in your thinking. 

You need to first recognize that the old methods were based on beliefs and myths, many of which have been proven either wrong or actually harmful. 

What can make the shift in thinking hard is that the old beliefs have been in place for a long, long time. They created long-established habits and practices. 

As Michael Young himself admitted, the initial switch to the new methods was difficult at first. In an interview in his final year at med school for the book Make It Stick, Michael said the solution was that “you just have to trust the process.”

And it wasn’t easy. “That was really the biggest hurdle for me,” he said, “to get myself to trust it.”[efn_note]

Michael Young’s story was first documented in the book  Make It Stick, which also includes quotes from interviews with Michael while at the Medical College of Georgia. Much thanks and gratitude to co-author Peter C. Brown, who interviewed Michael and includes extensive notes in the book on Michael’s personal experience with the 4 methods.[/efn_note]

“And,” he added, “it ended up working out really well for me.”

It all has the potential to work out really well for you too.  

What Could You Now Achieve with these Top 4 Methods?

While Michael’s own story has had a wonderful happy ending, there’s a tragic dimension to this overall story. 

Despite our know-how today in the science of learning and what these 4 top methods are, you most likely have not been taught or trained in these methods. Or certainly not very well. 

Worse, the old methods may have left you with a mindset that you’re not really be capable of learning new skills or advancing much further. 

Imagine where you might be a year from today if you too now routinely used the top science-backed methods.

What might happen if you too switched to these 4 top methods? 

Perhaps most important, how can you do so quickly and without spending thousands of dollars on expensive training that might not even produce results?

The short answer is you can make these changes starting right now, in the exact same ways Michael Young did.

Key Take-to-heart Takeaway 

The key first step is to do what Michael Young did, which means to begin by trusting the process. You should trust the process, because it is all based on science. 

Next Steps 

To start your next steps in becoming a more effective learner and using these top 4 methods, the simple next action is take action.

A simple way to get started, if you have not already done so, is to download this Free Illustrated Guide on the Top 4 Methods: Click here.

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