Understanding Hard Concepts | Studying Effectively for GCSE's & A-level's

hey friends and welcome back to our series and studying effectively for gcses and a levels so in this video i will briefly be discussing some techniques that i use to help me understand difficult concepts whilst preparing for exams as always timestamps will be in the description down below so do check those out during the video

so before we look at some of the techniques i think it's worth being aware of a cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge it's something experienced by many teachers and professors who may be very smart and have accomplished many things academically but quite bad at explaining and teaching new concepts to students because they no longer remember what it's like to be a young student learning that concept for the first time many teachers and professors tend to make assumptions when teaching that may not be obvious to students and they fail to explain the dreams and conclusions they're making uh which can make them less effective teachers and i have experienced this myself planned sometimes from growing up even many of my lecturers here in cambridge are quite bad at explaining some concepts despite being experts in their respective fields whereas some random guy on youtube often explains their concepts better than them that's because a random person can empathize with students because they can remember what it was like to be a student struggling to understand that new concept and can reverse adjust the explanation accordingly and go into many of the assumptions that many lecturers and teachers tend to make naturally i think that this is more a problem with electricity than it is with secondary school and sex form teachers and that's because lecturers generally have less interaction with students struggling to understand the concepts uh that they're explaining whereas teachers have more of an interaction with their students during listening so i'm telling you this because you shouldn't feel bad if you don't understand your teacher's explanation of a concept in class they may not be good at explaining the concept to students because they may have forgotten what it's like to be a student learning about that concepts for the

first time anyways so the first technique i use to understand difficult concepts is called the feynman technique so this technique was named after the nobel prize winning physicist richard feynman because he was really good at explaining complicated ideas in physics in simple terms to the general public and to young students essentially the feynman technique is a system by which you teach something you are learning to someone else as many people say the best way to understand something is to try and explain it to someone else the feynman technique turns this fact into a system by having you firstly attempt to use learning material which can be done by watching some youtube videos or reading a textbook or learning content for your class notes or something like that then on some paper or a whiteboard attempt to explain what you have just learned this could be to yourself or to a friend or family member but the important thing is that you're speaking out loud whilst explaining because it stops you feeling yourself and thinking you haven't understood it remember that it's much easier to make a jumps and perform mental gymnastics when you're thinking in your head than it is when speaking out loud and explaining it to someone else you may be feeling yourself into thinking you know something when you're explaining concept to yourself in your head than when you are out loud anyways whilst explaining the concept you may notice that you come to our hearts at some point or you can't quite explain the jump from a to b satisfactorily this is especially easy to notice when you're explaining it someone else who's able to ask you for a lot of questions and once you find yourself struggling to explain a small bit of the concept you should go back to the place you learned that material from whether it be videos or textbook or something like that and try and fill in the gaps if you can't using that material then it's worth doing some googling asking a friend or a teacher about it afterwards you go back to explaining and once you're able to explain the concepts from beginning to end then you have understood it well enough but if you come across another jump or a gap that you're struggling to explain then you should repeat the process now the reason i like this technique is because for subjects like maths and science rather than just memorizing methods of solving a problem by explaining the method to someone else you begin to understand why the method works and how you can make changes to method uh when they change one part of the problem and it isn't just for maths and science it's useful for pretty much any other subject whether it be explaining how some circumstances led such and such an event in history or trying to explain the overarching themes and plots in macbeth in english literature and how they arise and all that stuff and the thing i find most useful about this technique apart from helping you pinpoint areas which you don't understand is that it helps you see the big picture it can be quite easy to lose yourself in small and annoying details when learning a topic but trying to explain a topic or a concept to someone else and gives you a chance to step back and see how everything ties together nicely and to make the most of this technique i would recommend sticking to diagrams potentially mind maps and flow charts or any other sort of illustrations during your explanations because it can help you better understand the concept just writing out four sentences when explaining a concept isn't particularly useful and even using analogies can be helpful because it gives you a chance to relate something you already know it's something new you're trying to learn and understand through the feynman technique ultimately the main idea is that if you use a system for teaching someone else or what you want to learn you can better understand the topic and when it comes to making flashcards in it it's much easier for you to recall the details than if you didn't understand it and just memorize it although it's worth bearing in mind that sometimes it's better to just memorize certain steps like saying a chemical reaction because trying to understand the why in too much detail will lead you onto university level material or even phd level material which may be interesting to read about but you won't really be assessed on it

now the second technique is quite similar to the first because it takes inspiration from something called rubber duck programming essentially what many software engineers do is they carry around a rubber duck and when their code isn't working and they can't seem to figure out why they force themselves to explain their code line by line to rubber duck but it doesn't have to just be a rubber duck it can be any uh usually inanimate object or just to yourself and usually during the process of explaining it suddenly hits them why something in that code wasn't working now i tend to do something similar when trying to understand some steps in an argument or some logic i would go through line by line and then explain the logic to myself so i can pinpoint exactly which point in the argument is stumbling me for example if it's six steps and i didn't understand how to get from steps 45 and the process of self explaining would pinpoint that this is a step i don't understand and can no longer explain to myself afterwards i would turn this into a very precise and well-worded question to ask something along the lines of i understand x and y are true for such and such a reason but going to point zen surely called me true for such uncertainty reason trying to turn your problems into a well-voided question can help you pinpoint exactly where you're stuck and why you're stuck and half the time i find that just by coming up with the question itself i realize and solve the issue myself and over half the time i would ask the teacher this question that i just came up with and usually they can help you so much more easily and quickly because of the well-worded question asking a teacher a specific question is so much more helpful than just saying to them i don't understand everything that's going on here it saves both you time and them time and it means that you did some thinking beforehand about your problem uh and that means that if you have any follow-up questions and you can ask them way more easily it's a win-win really either you figure out yourself or you give it to a teacher and your teacher will be happy because you took time to come up with a well thought out question so those were the

two main techniques i used when studying hard concepts others that i also used were asking friends to explain something for me because if they understand it then they can sometimes explain it better than the teacher and because of the curse of knowledge that i mentioned before and having studied group chat where anyone can ask anyone else any questions is pretty helpful for this as well if you think about it just from your friends helping each other out it's not really going to make a difference to the grade boundaries especially at gcse when they're like 700 000 students uh all doing let's say like gcse maps you helping like three or four other people out it's just not going to make a difference in great boundaries in reality secondly googling intuition for x helps a lot for example say that i'm learning about matrix multiplication in a level five maps and i'm wondering why and if it's defined to be like that if i search intuition for matrix multiplication on google then i can find a few good resources that give me an idea and having an intuition for something can help you remember it and help you solve tricky problems a bit more easily and finally just by searching the name of a concept on google images and finding diagrams on it was pretty helpful as well often just a one good diagram or a gif can summarize a process well enough and can make it much easier for you to understand and remember i would often add these images onto my flashcards as well and try to remember the image instead of the text because the images are much easier to remember a few final tips i

have is that firstly don't assume that you're always doing something wrong if learning feels hard usually the harder learning is and the more cognitive effort you're putting in to understand something the better because once you achieve the level of understanding that you want you will be able to remember it much more easily and for longer because of the amount of effort you put in during the learning process secondly often whatever is hard for you it's going to be hard for tens of thousands of other students you have the choice between giving up or being one of a few students who actually persevere and make an effort to understand the concepts and finally some concepts can take a while to digest they may take days of thinking about the concepts off and on uh for something to click and i will go into more detail about this in a later video in which i talk about how to tackle hard problems as well so do look forward to that anyways that's

pretty much it for this video and i'll see you next one in the series