In this blog, I previously introduced the concept of metacognition and shared my story about how I discovered how to learn more quickly and efficiently.  This article will flesh out how to acquire and maintain knowledge to perform better in school and in life.

The two steps to learning

Science tells us that there are two steps we must go through to learn anything. 

The first step, the knowledge-acquisition phase, can be significantly enhanced by employing metacognition, loosely defined as thinking about your thinking. In this step, you’ll consume learning materials and begin to store them in memory.

Step two is a perpetual knowledge-maintenance plan. Here, you’ll utilize memory retrieval practices to develop competence in easily recalling your learnings. 

It is important to space out these retrieval practices. Spacing optimally trains your mind so that you gain the ability to summon the information whenever you need it. We call these repeated retrieval practice sessions spaced repetition. 

By using these two science-backed steps, you will excel academically and, if you desire, retain the information forever. “Forever” here is qualified by a commitment to maintaining your knowledge by an ongoing regimen of spaced repetition. The spacing time intervals for long-term retention do get very prolonged, so long as you are successful in the periodic retrievals.

Distill, extract, and process

When consuming your learning materials, the primary goal is to distill and extract all of the essential bits of information that they contain. Then you need to process those concepts and facts and deliberately construct a narrative of interconnected knowledge.

An easy way to think of it is with the analogy of a building. 

1. On the first floor is the original learning content that you have been consuming. 
2. On the second floor are the bits of knowledge that you have distilled and extracted from the original. 
3. On the penthouse floor are your metacognition and higher-order thinking. Here you create a narrative using your inner voice. That voice is the one that we all have and use for constant internal chatter. Use it to purposely think about your thinking. Create associations between what you have just learned and what you already know. Compare and contrast the new information with your existing knowledge. 

You’ll be able to take what you’ve learned and play with it, build on it, apply it, evaluate it, and create with it. If you’re like me, you’ll find it incredibly satisfying to combine the many pieces of learnings you’ve acquired from various domains of knowledge. Then remix, expand and innovate. The more knowledge that you possess, the more imagination you’ll have for creativity.

The curse of rereading

Rereading the same information over and over is a tremendous waste of time. When we approach our learning materials, we should do so with the intention to read them once and never need to have to read to the material again.

Typically, students see endless rereading as a primary strategy for learning. They believe that if you passively re-consume some content enough times, it will eventually stick. Even if they highlight texts on the first encounter, they mistakenly believe that endless rereading of the highlights will ultimately burn the content into their memory. Studies have shown that highlighting text and passively re-reading the highlights adds very little to a student’s knowledge.

The fact is that subsequent passive rereadings, re-watchings, and re-listenings accomplish little more than the first encounter. The operative word here is passive. We aren’t human vacuum cleaners who can suck the words off a page and into long-term memory. Vacuuming the words over and over simply doesn’t work. Retrieval practice and metacognition are active processes that do make it stick.

Within this single reading, a lot of intra-session rereading is allowed and often necessary to fully grasp complex concepts and complete the mission.

You must become skilled at acquiring knowledge and incorporating it into your mind if you want to get serious about learning. 

Academic content invariably includes facts and concepts relevant to that subject domain. Each of these is a speck in that total domain of knowledge. But, not all of the factual information may be worth committing to memory, as it might not be practical in your life. You need to learn to tease the essential facts and concepts out. A crucial part of this curation involves developing a knack for recognizing which points are core and which are simply background information.

When you process your learning materials, you have to go in with a mission. You have to parse, comprehend and abstract out the core, relevant material. So yes, you are consuming it once, but a lot is going on in this solitary reading. Within this single reading, a lot of intra-session rereading is allowed and often necessary to fully grasp complex concepts and complete the mission. Once you have collected what you want to take with you, you need to incorporate it into your knowledge base to be confident it’ll be available to you in the future.

I won’t lie to you. This isn’t always a pleasurable process. It’s effortful. It requires far more engagement and focus than the passive reading style that most students are accustomed.

The amount of effort this process requires will vary depending on what you need to gain from your materials. Facts are relatively easy to grasp. It’s the concepts that require the most significant effort, metacognitively speaking. Concepts are abstractions that often help organize facts and ideas into a system of understanding. Concepts are sometimes abstract, and as such, prove more difficult to grasp on the first pass.

Key takeaways

Passive reading is a near effortless and lazy activity. We all prefer to chillax through our studies. But ironically, the lazy approach is more work in the long run, if you hope to arrive at the same destination as the top students. By bringing your metacognition to bear when reading, you are making an up-front investment with a substantial payoff long-term payoff. When you walk away from content with the core concepts and facts processed into your own words, you have reached your peak moment of knowing the material. When you apply spaced retrieval practices, you can maintain your knowingness near that peak and you 'll never have to reread the original material again. 

I just said that you'll have reached the zenith knowing the material. But that isn’t wholly true. As you actively consume new content in the future, you will recall via your metacognition, how that new material relates to your existing knowledge. Then you may come to know past learnings more fully.

Our next article will delve more deeply into what the metacognitive process looks like in practice. See you there.