Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)

I have notes with me for anything of importance. rule 2 and beyond is of no concern to me.

I got through uni on entirely point 1, and only relied on accidental memorization from the process of understanding.

I find alot of study advice under-emphasise point 1, and over-emphasise memorization techniques.

I always thought that point 1 is obvious (don't try to memorize Goethe in the original if you don't understand any German) and that point 2 is where it's at, and what most people underemphasize (learn the material before you try to memorize it). Granted, some types of learning and memorization go hand in hand; but for me the key point is to not try to use SRS to learn the material. Writing and rewriting notes; explaining topics out loud to myself and others; and using information to create something of my own — those are the ways I learn best. And at that point I've naturally memorized a lot already because I've "internalized" it; the spaced recall system becomes more of a repeating task list to remind me to practice recalling what I already learned, right before I would forget it. In that way it's similar to my OmniFocus lists of repeating maintenance tasks and chores, except that the repetition scheme varies with my forgetting curve instead of on a plain daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly schedule.

> Writing and rewriting notes; explaining topics out loud to myself and others; and using information to create something of my own — those are the ways I learn best. And at that point I've naturally memorized a lot already because I've "internalized" it.

Yes precisely. That's generally where i end it. If I've understood the topic well enough to reason about it, rephrase in a compact form, or explain it to someone else, i consider the process done. Doing so during university always made me pass reliably.

Flash cards & repeated practice always felt like a cheat to memorize parts i had not sufficiently understood or learnt. Memorization techniques are a great way to pass exams and get grades, but terrible way to learn in the longrun. Any details that would truly require memorization techniques (numbers or large lists of terms) are things i would want to look up to be sure of in the real-world anyway, so why try memorize them.

Whenever i look up "study advice" i often see memorization techniques, but very rarely see plain old; "read the book slowly page-by-page, Write down any questions, summarize whenever you feel you understood the section, go back to previous chapters when confused, cross check with other sources or explanations if not sufficient, try practice problems to check if you've understood correctly"

This article leans in that direction as-well; 1&2 are mentioned briefly, but encompass the vast majority learning process. All the rest of the points are memorization aids that i would consider footnotes to the learning process at best.