Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens

If you do a little bit of focused work just before going to sleep, you’re more likely to dream about it. And dreaming about your studies can help you on your tests. It sticks better.5

Everybody’s different. That’s why it’s important to become your own personal learning scientist. You can see what works best in your learning. Think like a scientist and start looking for patterns in what works and what doesn’t work for you. Music can be either helpful or harmful when it comes to learning.

Make up metaphors for the information you’re trying to remember. You know we love this. Think of similarities between the object or idea you want to remember and something you already know. You could try drawing it. The picture below shows how chemical bonds for benzene are like monkeys holding hands and tails.

Just watching other people, or looking at a solution, or reading a page, can allow you to get started. But it won’t do much to build your own neural structures of learning.

Practicing different aspects and techniques of the skill you are trying to learn is called interleaving.4 (Just remember your interstellar friend, Leaf. Interleave—get it?) Here

But when you interleave, you start mixing in other types of problems, so you can see the difference.

hear the birds singing, and see the little rabbit trails.

See elegant simplifications that others

Breathe deeply from the belly for a few breaths if you feel panicky before or during a test. It’s easy to make mistakes on a test. Your mind can trick you into thinking that what you’ve done is correct, even if it isn’t. This means that, whenever possible, you should blink, shift your attention, and then double-check your answers using a big-pictur