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

by Barbara Oakley

If you are trying to understand or figure out something new, your best bet is to turn off your precision-focused thinking and turn on your “big picture” diffuse mode,

one of the first steps toward gaining expertise in math and science is to create conceptual chunks—mental leaps that unite separate bits of information through meaning.

Using recall—mental retrieval of the key ideas—rather than passive rereading will make your study time more focused and effective.

You must have information persisting in your memory if you are to master the material well enough to do well on tests and think creatively with it.

Most difficult problems are solved through intuition, because they make a leap away from what you are familiar with.

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

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

that writing by hand helps get the ideas into mind more easily than if you type the answer.

Even if what you are studying is very advanced, simplifying so you can explain to others who do not share your educational background can be surprisingly helpful in building your understanding.