Learning New Content | Studying Effectively for GCSE's & A-level's

hey friends and welcome back to our series installing effectively for gcse's nail levels in this video i will be going through the process by which i learned some new content in a chronological order as well as including an example as always timestamps will be in the description down below so do check those out during the video

so for most of you the first time you will learn about a new piece of content will be during class and the most natural thing to do is to take notes during the lesson now whilst taking notes during a lesson is good because it helps you pay attention and gives you something to reference later i find that many people take this to extreme and are writing almost everything the teacher is saying throughout the lesson now i think there are a few issues with writing continuously throughout the lesson the main issue i found is that by writing throughout the lesson you end up focusing too much on the process of writing and can get quite anxious if you aren't keeping up with the speed of the teacher instead we should be focusing on the contents itself and not the process of writing down content our aim when learning about something for the very first time should be to first understand the material and especially when the teacher is presenting it because you can ask them questions during the lesson and only after we understand material shall we focus on remembering it so personally what i do during lessons is that i pay attention and listen to a teacher for about five to ten minutes and when they take a pause or finish explaining a concept or an idea then i will jot down a few notes and draw some sketches explaining the same concept i find that alternating between periods of writing and periods of just paying attention allowed me not to get caught up in trying to copy down everything that was being said but actually allowed me to focus on first understanding the material being presented rather than just writing it all down now since we should focus on understanding and as we will be using digital flash cards and notes as you will see later in the series i didn't concern myself with being too neat i think that trying to be neat and switching between different colored pens or highlights is just a distraction from the whole process of understanding i think that different colored highlighters are only useful when drawing complicated diagrams and marking work and on that note diagrams are especially important because for subjects like maths and science you can summarize a lot of information into just a few good diagrams ultimately this meant that most of my time in class was spent on understanding the material and asking questions and the small amounts of time was actually spent on making bullet points of the information being presented in my own words i didn't worry too much about trying to get every little detail down during the lesson instead i focused on getting the overall idea of what was going on in the topic as you will see later in the video we focused on smaller details later after we built up a bigger picture i then repeated this process for every lesson during the week and made an effort to understand the content presented in each lesson after a few lessons when a subject teach had finished teaching a topic or a large enough chunk of a topic i usually had a big picture of what was going on in the topic investment that can now focus on smaller details so these are some of my class

notes from a-level chemistry and as you can see we were learning about the topic of phenol and its reactions in class this is a topic from the second year of a level country so don't worry if you haven't seen this before i'm just using as an example here now if i were to add some extra information onto these notes and perhaps rephrase some things then this piece of paper is going to get pretty cluttered besides there's no point in doing any of that if i'm not going to then later test myself on the material to make use of active recall the goal here is to add any extra information that we want to onto these nodes and then turn them into flash cards so we can make use of active recall which as we've established in earlier videos is one of the most powerful learning techniques then we will import these flash cards into a program called anki which will help us make use of the over effective learning technique which is space repetition so let's switch over to computer to see how this is done now i created a folder for the subjects on my google drive and i saved the specification into this folder as well so if i look at the specification i can see that i have six modules for chemistry and i have made a folder for each of these modules so if i look up where the top coffee nose is by uh doing ctrl f and then search phenol uh you can see it's in module 6 organic chemistry and analysis and is in section 6. 1 aromatic compounds carbonyls and acids so if i then go into module 6 and i create a new document and i'll call this document flashcards so after creating this flash cards document what i do is i write out the modules so you can see i have 6. 1 aromatic compounds carbonyls and acids so just add a dash in here and turn this into a heading one and then i use a sub module as well so i have the sub module 6. 1. 1 aromatic compounds so if i just paste this here and turn that into a heading two and if i just repeat this for everything else from the specification under this module so after writing out all the sub modules and sub modules i check where phenol is on the specification and you can see if i scroll up it fits under 6. 1. 1 aromatic compounds um so underneath aromatic compounds what i like to do is i insert a table uh two columns any number of rows because we can always add more rows later and then i make the first column about a third of the length and the second column about two-thirds and then i just pasted this table underneath for the rest of the headings what i do now is i type up my notes from class under 6. 1. 1 aromatic compounds whilst adding more rows to this table if needs be i make sure each row is roughly split by concept and i bullet point my notes from class into right hand column this process is quite nice because it gives me a chance to review the information that i learned from class as i type it up if there are any diagrams that i need to use then i find an image of something similar of google images and i copy into here or i would take a picture of the diagram on my phone upload it to google drive using the app on my phone and then import it into notes after i finish the process of typing all these notes i'll make any corrections to any spelling mistakes and then also change the font to proxima nova because i prefer that font now it's so much easier to add any extra content i need to these notes and it gave me a chance to review the material as i was typing up so now what i would usually have is a list of sources i can cross check with and i would store these on a kanban board on notion which i mentioned in my previous organization video for example in chemistry for module 6 i have these sources which i need to use in turn by turn so i've added some from class and do bear in mind that i won't watch all the videos um or use all the sources if i feel pretty confident that i understood something pretty well from class and i've covered all the content then i generally wouldn't use it and i just skim watch these videos um like on double or triple speed so now if i look up the first source which is camera vise and then i can find the ocr revision guides on camera vice because i'm doing ocr here and then i would go down to aromatic compounds here and let's find phenol on here so these are the phenol notes from cameravise and what i would do is i would just add any extra information on these onto my notes from these camera visor notes so if i do that now so now that i finished using these notes to add any extra information that i needed to which were a few more bullet points i would go back to the board and then see that i also have to add from my chem guys so i've added from camera boys um so now if i search my chem guy phenol um you can see he has a few videos in phenol so i'm not gonna watch this now but usually what i would do is i'd watch through this um and i think he has it on his playlist as well so ocr module one if i go here then you can see he has two videos in phenol and a few others so usually what i would do is i'd watch this and if it's covering things too slowly then i would just speed up the video by going um and setting the speed a bit higher and then make any more notes from the video which i would then add on to these to make sure i've have fully understood everything and any diagrams that i like i would screenshot as well and add it onto those notes too and i think these videos are pretty good at generally helping me understand concepts and ideas that i can then explain into my own words uh on the notes so after i've added some information from my chem guy i would go to the cgp revision guide and because i have the digital version i can just log in and access it from here so you can see this is a phenol section and it explains more about phenol and a few other things here and i would basically use this to cross check any information i had by reading for it and i would do a similar process for the textbook as well um and the reason i use the cgp revision guide in the textbook as the final checkboxes um is because i think the main mistake people make with cgp revision guides is using them to learn the content they're meant as more of a revision guide which means they're only useful if you have some understanding or an idea of what the topic is on about if you open the cg revision guide without understanding the topic and the big picture and it's quite easy to get lost in a lot of these bullet points and details and not knowing what's going on so here i mainly use a cg provision guide to make sure i've learnt on the content and using it as a reference and getting any images that i find useful from it by screenshotting them but i would never really put too much effort into using it and place too much emphasis on like the mining details in the revision guide and as for the digital version of the textbook i would check that at the end as well to screenshot any more diagrams that i find useful and can add onto my notes but usually videos and online notes distill the concepts very well i find that the textbook tends to go all over the place and in my experience it wasn't too useful i would often skim read it and barely add anything onto my notes after that because a lot of places like the videos and the uh notes on camera voice it's tended to simplify the information quite well but unfortunately most gcse a-level students don't know what good textbooks are like as the only time i think people really put effort into writing the textbook is for university textbooks so it's quite easy to sell off with something mediocre which isn't too helpful and using something that ends up causing more issues than it actually solves ultimately remember that if a resource isn't working for you it isn't your fault provided you're putting some effort into understanding it so all i can say is that if you find the textbook useful then use it if not don't bother personally i only found it useful for skim reading to make sure i had covered most of the main ideas and for screenshotting any diagrams so after working through the cgp revision guide and the textbook and adding any extra small things onto my notes they were pretty much done so i can check off these two boxes and after writing down all the information from these various resources now i can combine many of the bullet points together because there may be some duplicate information and then give the notes a bit more structure which makes the next step easier which is this process of turning these notes into flashcards and during the combining process um when combining any bullet points together it gives me a chance to actually make sure i have understood all the material and can turn it into a more coherent structure so then when i learn these later topics as well in class then i would repeat a similar process and use these notes uh these uh resources that i mentioned on notion and obviously uncheck all the boxes and recheck them again for that topic uh just make sure i'm doing the order correctly also i would recommend that you stick to a few good resources such as cameravise and mychem guy if you're doing ocr chemistry rather than a lot of poor quality resources and i would aim for about three to five because i find any more than that can be overwhelming and besides for like any minor detail which is very important and you may have missed somehow um because it wasn't in any of these resources you will encounter in an exam question after doing some past papers if it's that important and then you can add that onto your notes as well

so now using all these resources to review and understand the material next up is turning these notes into flashcards because there isn't much point in making notes unless we test ourselves on them using active recall and space repetition and having flashcards an additional app like anki is a great way to do both in case you don't know what ikea is the following video in the series will explain anki and the basics of using it in this video i will just be turning these notes into flashcards so usually i like to stick to one concept for card and like to ignore any trivial information by that i mean if you're doing a level chemistry then there's not much point in making a flash card called what is a relative charge dominant electron because that should be pretty obvious to you at that point if you're doing any level chemistry but of course if you're doing gcse chemistry and learning it for the first time then it may not be obvious and likewise making a flashcard such as what is phenol when you're first learning about phenol uh can be helpful but if you then go into the chemistry university then you don't really need that flashcard anymore because you should know what phenol is by that point anyways try not to worry about getting the level of detail just right in each flashcard you always have an opportunity to edit and trim down the flashcard each time you review it and as you do more exam questions in past papers you get an idea of what sort of things are useful and will never come up my flashcards weren't perfect the first time and sometimes when i was going through them then i would edit them and make improvements to phrasing or make it a bit more concise i think it's much better to make improvements on the fly when you're reviewing the flashcards uh whenever you realize something rather than staring at this document for ages and hoping some improvements or suggestions come to mind also turning the content to flashcards helps me to continue to engage with the material as i think about how to rephrase it into a question so now that i finished telling my notes flashcards i check again with the specification uh underneath the phenol section to make sure i've covered all the points they want me to know about in my flashcard somewhere and once i've finished checking it basically means my flashcards are ready in the next video we will be learning about anki and in the one after i will show you how to add these flashcards in tanki and use anki for reviewing the flashcards and making use of space repetition

so this is essentially a process i would repeat every weekend or every other weekend or even on some weekdays uh depending on my mood and how ahead or on top i wanted to feel the process was basically reviewing the material i learned some lesson by making notes on my computer and then adding on to those notes uh and then turning those into flashcards which i would then consistently use throughout the year so by the time my nwa exams came around i basically knew everything i needed to and it's important to remember that this process does not mean you've learned everything perfectly remember that ultimately learning as a gradual process reviewing the content and making and going through flashcards and doing practice questions and past papers is all part of a learning process it's not like you have to first learn something before you do practice questions and pass papers on it sure you have to know most of it but it doesn't mean you have to know everything before you can um start doing those questions it's not like there's some magic off on switch where at one moment you don't know something and the next moment you've learnt it and remember that learning can be a difficult process too so don't be discouraged you will get stuck a few times you won't understand the teacher or a video and your explanation on the flash card may be unsatisfactory in which case it can be useful to ask your friends or do some research online or ask in an online form to um for people to help you but yeah that's basically

for this video and i'll see the next one in which i will talk more about using anki