A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)

by Barbara Oakley

Ultimately, both bottom-up chunking and top-down big-picture approaches are vital if you are to become an expert with the material. We love creativity and the idea of being able to learn by seeing the big picture. But you can’t learn mathematics or science without also including a healthy dose of practice and repetition to help you build the chunks that will underpin your expertise.27 Research published in the journal Science provided solid evidence along these lines.28 Students studied a scientific text and then practiced it by recalling as much of the information as they could. Then they restudied the text and recalled it (that is, tried to remember the key ideas) once more. The results? In the same amount of time, by simply practicing and recalling the material, students learned far more and at a much deeper level than they did using any other approach, including simply rereading the text a number of times or drawing concept maps that supposedly enriched the relationships in the materials under study. This improved learning comes whether students take a formal test or just informally test themselves.