How to Study Effectively: It’s Not Just About Information Input
Study to Complete the Circuit
When we think of studying, the first thing that comes to mind is often what goes into our brains: the facts, the techniques, the information we need to learn. We picture a student at a desk poring over a book or listening attentively to a teacher. This idea of studying misses huge and important components of effective study. Basing your study habits only around input could seriously impede our kids’ study habits.
A lot of classroom learning and studying is done receptively or via input. We're presented with information through one or more of our five senses, typically through listening, watching/looking, or reading. This puts the information in the realm of our working memory, which is a short-term operating system that holds the information so we can process it for understanding. But information has to make it to long-term storage for us to truly learn it. How do we make that happen? Through expressive learning or output. In expressive learning, we actively produce something with the receptive information: we write, we take notes, we annotate, we draw a picture, we explain a concept, we create a visual image in our imagination. Studying must involve completing the receptive-expressive circuit until the expressive path can be accomplished without receptive supports.
That means that to study effectively, we need activities that include output, ideally with strong creative and visual components. I like to think of this as studying to complete the circuit. Information has to go into our brains AND come out of them in order to be integrated effectively into our memories. We need both receptive learning (input) and expressive learning (output).
What is Input?
Input–or receptive learning methods–are what people typically think of when they think of studying. These are activities where you absorb information.
Some examples of input include:
Reading
Watching–This includes watching videos or in-person demonstrations
Listening–The most common example is listening to the teacher
Any activity that involves learning using our five senses
What is Output?
Output is expressive learning. It includes any activity where the student expresses what they are learning through writing, expression, or a creative activity. Some examples of output include:
Writing (taking notes, annotating)
Expression (teaching someone else, describing)
Acting out
Creating something (project, craft, video)
Drawing (Quick doodle, picture scenes, a process or system, timelines)
I’m going to address incorporating these activities into study in my next blog post. Join my email list so you don’t miss it!
Why is Completing the Circuit with Output Critically Important?
In expressive learning, we are active and produce something with the receptive information: we write; we take notes; we annotate; we draw pictures; we explain concepts; we create visual images in our imaginations. Good studying should involve completing the receptive-expressive circuit until the expressive path can be accomplished without receptive support.
Visualization is great for executive functioning overall, but it is critical for working memory. There’s an analogy that I really love from a book called Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn, by Barbara Oakley, PhD. The author is an educator turned neuroscientist who is trying to blend neuroscience with education. I love her working memory analogy:
Working memory is like rolling a ball down a ramp. It goes down the ramp, and then it’s just gone. How do we get the information from the working memory before it falls off the ramp and get it into our long-term memory? The answer is retrieval. There has to be some kind of activity that forces us to retrieve the information. This is why visualization is so powerful. We’re giving them the receptive language and they immediately have to do something with it. They have to create a picture immediately. They have to describe what they see to you immediately.
Visualization is a great way to support nonverbal working memory. Add verbalization of that visualization, and you are incorporating verbal working memory into the task. Even mental engagement with the subject turns learning into expressive learning for the purposes of completing the circuit. Making associations to previously learned information and creating mental pictures in your imagination are great ways to generate output even while you’re engaged in receptive learning.
A great example of this is story time with younger kids. If a teacher is reading them a book, that is receptive learning or input. Stopping the story and prompting kids to mentally experience it—better yet, encouraging them to express what they’re visualizing and experiencing—helps them retain the story much more effectively.
Take a story about a child named Sal going berry picking as an example. If I just told the story as-is, without any expressive learning, kids might remember some elements of it. But if I stop in the telling to ask questions that help them make associations and visualize, they are much more likely to remember more details of the story. Questions like:
What part of the world do you think Sal is in? Have you been there? What does it look like, or what do you imagine it looks like?
What kinds of berries is Sal picking? Have you eaten those berries? What do they look like? What do they taste like?
Want to learn more? Check out my new handout on studying to complete the circuit. It’s available free to members of my online educational community. Or, you can purchase it in my shop.
Here are some ways you can study to complete the circuit in different subject areas.
Complete the Circuit for…Math
Have you ever said that you don’t truly understand something until you can do it yourself? That is particularly true of math. Doing math is a complex process. In order to succeed at a new math concept, a child may need to be able to recognize new symbols, recall key concepts (and apply them to a novel situation), different math functions, and the ability to recognize what is required in a given situation and prioritize it. Whew! There’s a lot more to understanding how the brain works when kids learn math. (You can learn more in my material on literacy and math in my online learning community.) But for the purposes of improving math study habits, remember that output is critical! Kids need to practice generating math symbols and using math concepts themselves to make them their own. That is what puts them in their long-term memory and makes them accessible when it comes time to apply them on a test or in a more complex problem. Here’s what input and output learning looks like for math:
Input Activities for Math
Listen to the teacher explain the problem
Look at the board
Watch videos online
Output Activities for Math
Do practice problems. Every practice problem helps engrave the concepts into long term memory.
Draw out equations. This is a visualization practice, and it could be anything that makes sense to the student. Write out equations. Practice retrieving the different equations needed for various math processes.
Teach someone else how to do the problems. When we have to explain something in our own words, it practices our recall of the key concepts and creates new neural pathways for understanding and remembering them. All of that makes learning more effective.
Complete the Circuit for… English or Language Arts
Language processing includes receptive and expressive pathways. For example, just because a student can point to the pen when asked to do so does not mean that he can say, “pen” when asked to label it. Although the stimulus of the pen is the same, the routes in and out of the brain for identification and labeling are different. That’s why expressive learning is so important to studying language! Without the ability to express, our use of language is limited.
Input Activities for English or Language Arts
Listen to the teacher
Watch movies or videos
Read
Output Activities for English or Language Arts
Take notes. Writing notes as you listen requires prioritizing ideas and coming up with your own language to express it. I’ll write more about taking notes in my next blog post.
Annotate while reading. Write or draw pictures in the margins. Personally, I’ll never be able to resell my used books because they are FULL of notes and highlights. Reading shouldn’t be a passive activity, especially when you’re studying! Everyone does it a little differently. Make it fun with different colors of pens or highlighters. Draw faces expressing your feelings to a passage. Interact with the text using words and drawings.
Write. Book reports are such a great example of expressive learning. Can you remember all of the books you read as a child? Probably not. But I bet you’re a lot more likely to remember the books for which you wrote a report. Write a paragraph about a topic you’re learning in class. Write a letter to an imaginary or historical figure.
Teach someone else. Like with math, teaching someone else requires being able to explain something in your own words and answer questions about it. This works with English and language arts as well.
Tell a story to someone else. Telling a story requires us to first visualize or mentally experience what we’re going to say, then put it into words. This is a great way to practice using new vocabulary or grammar concepts.
Create and use flashcards to practice defining terms. Creating flashcards can be an exercise in expressive study in and of itself, even if it just involves writing a term on the card. Using the flashcards can include prompting the child to spell the word aloud or define it in her own words. Showing the definition of a word on the card and asking the child to recall it helps her learn to generate the word in her speech when it’s needed. Quizlet is great for this! I use it in therapy with some kids when we are working on study skills.
Complete the Circuit for… Social Studies or History
Think back to our example of telling a story about picking berries. Putting the information in a known context and visualizing it are key to studying social studies or history! Even if you only cared about the child learning important dates in history (and I hope that’s not the case!), helping the child contextualize those dates or visualize them will help her learn and retain the information.
Input Activities for Social Studies or History
Listen to the teacher
Watch movies or videos
Read
Output Activities for Social Studies or History
Take notes.
Create or use flashcards for terms
Draw of visualize pictures for people and scenes
Draw a timeline. This helps put events in context with one another and with events the child may already know about. Plus, I never pass up an opportunity to visualize.
Point to the spot on an existing timeline where a given event occurred. The act of physically pointing to the left, right, or middle engages movement. That’s output!
Create a video explaining a series of events
Act out historical scenes or events
Complete the Circuit for… Science
Input Activities for Science
Listen to the teacher
Watch movies or videos
Read
Output Activities for Science
Draw or model a process/system. Making a model solar system is a little cliché, but once you’ve done it, it’s hard to forget that Jupiter is the largest planet or that Saturn has rings.
Explaining a process or system to someone else. As with other subjects, explaining something in your own words practices recall and association of concepts.
Create and use flashcards for key terms concepts. Creating the flashcards is good practice writing terms and concepts. Using them practices expressing words and ideas verbally. Both are great expressive activities.
Want to Learn More?
Check out my new handout on studying to complete the circuit. It’s available free to members of my online educational community. Or, you can purchase it in my shop.
I use Instagram to share new things I’m learning from reading and from my private practice. Follow me here.
I wrote a book! The Seeds of Learning: A Cognitive Processing Model for Speech, Language, Literacy, and Executive Functioning is available for sale on Amazon.
I offer my keystone course–the Executive Function Roots–twice a year in my Seeds of Learning® community of practice. Sign up to get a notification next time enrollment opens!
Finally, I run a thriving private practice, and I’m available for speaking engagements. Learn more about me and my methods here.
