The Science of Self-Learning: How to Teach Yourself Anything, Learn More in Less Time, and Direct Your Own Education (Learning how to Learn Book 1)

by Peter Hollins

This book aims to ease some of those problems and help you become a dedicated, determined, and agile self-learner in whatever discipline you choose.

It will take you through the steps of finding your inspiration to learn, planning, developing positive habits, and driving your own education.

Building self-discipline is one of the handiest “by-products” of self-education because it can be replicated in all other areas of your life.

Self-learning lets you pick up all those interests and passions you might have had to set aside in formal education.

Studies have shown that people, on average, have five to seven careers throughout their lifetimes.

Will you be limited by your lack of self-learning abilities, or will you be able to seamlessly transition from one career to the next?

The best way to combat this “brain drain” is by working on self-management skills, particularly organization. This simply means taking a lot of time ahead of any task to set up systems, routines, and actions that will make the task easier to execute on an ongoing basis.

For the self-learner, this process means organizing yourself and your materials to facilitate gathering information, studying, comprehending, and testing yourself on what you’ve learned.

How will you produce what you’ve learned—writing, video, a project, or some other means?

Motivation 3.0 is all about intrinsic motivation. It’s spurred by Pink’s belief that “the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to make a contribution.”

Inspiration is, invariably, a stronger force than compulsion. Keeping your eye on what you will give yourself through self-learning will always be a strong, guiding force in your studies, and nobody can provide that to you but yourself.

Takeaways:

Self-motivation is related to self-regulation. It’s an essential aspect of self-learning because there is no educator to impose rigidity upon you—just yourself. You are both the teacher and the student, and that comes with the task of self-motivation.

There are three main aspects of intrinsic motivation to keep yourself moving toward your goal of self-learning: autonomy, mastery, and purpose/impact.

The SQ3R Method

For the large majority of school subjects, textbooks are the core of the study program along with lectures and discussions. A typical teacher’s entire lesson plan for a year usually draws from the structure and sequence of at least one textbook.

American educator Francis P. Robinson developed a method meant to help students really get the most comprehension from the texts

The SQ3R method, named for its five components: survey question read recite review

Survey. The first step in the method is getting a general overview of what you’ll be reading.

The survey component is for you to get the most general introduction to the topic so you can establish and shape the goals you want to achieve from reading the book.

It’s just like taking a look at the entire map before you set off on a road trip.

In the SQ3R method, surveying means examining the structure of the work: the book title, the introduction or preface, section titles, chapter titles, headings and subheadings. If the book is illustrated with pictures or graphics, you’d review them.

When you survey and know the significance of what you’re currently learning, you are able to instantly comprehend it better. It’s the difference between looking at a single gear in isolation versus seeing where and how it works in a complex clock.

The important aspect is that you’ve surveyed the topic before diving in and thus understand what you’re getting into and why.

Question. In the second stage of the SQ3R method, you’re still not diving into the deep end. During the question stage, you’ll work a little more deeply to get your mind more prepared to focus and interact with the material you’re reading. You’ll take a slightly closer look at the structure of the book and form some questions you wanted answered or set up the objectives you want to achieve.

preparing to read—you’d go through the chapter titles, headings, and subheadings and rephrase them in the form of a question. This turns the dry title the author has given into a challenge or problem for you to solve.

You don’t have to answer the questions yet—you just need to know how you’re going to record them when you do.

Reading. In this stage you’re finally ready to dive into the material. Because you’ve gotten the lay of the land and formed some questions and goals for your studies, you’re a little more engaged when you finally sit down to read. You’re looking for answers to the questions you’ve raised.

Reciting. This step is crucial in processing the information you’re learning about and is the biggest difference between reading to learn and reading for entertainment.

Ask questions—out loud, verbally—about what you’re reading.

This is also the point where you take copious notes in the margins of the text and underline or highlight key points.

Recitation is verbal and also through writing. However, it’s important to restate these points in your own words rather than just copy phras...

The important part is that you are taking the time to rephrase and recite new knowledge and make it meaningful to you—and no one else.

Review. The final stage of the SQ3R plan is when you go back over the material that you’ve studied, re-familiarize yourself with the most important points, and build your skills at memorizing the material.

tactics in general. They include writing more questions of important parts you have highlighted, orally answering some of the questions if you can, reviewing your notes, creating flashcards for important concepts and terminology, rewriting the table of contents using your own words, and building out a mind map.

This step is meant to strengthen your memory of the material, but it does more than that. It can help you see connections and similarities between different aspects that you might not have picked up at first and put concepts and ideas into greater context.

you’ve gotten into the nitty-gritty, and now you should take a step back, reevaluate, and make updated, more accurate, and insightful connections.

Cornell Notes

method of note-taking is called the Cornell method,

Label the right column “Notes” and label the left column “Cues.” Leave a couple inches empty at the bottom of the page and label that section “Summary.”

you will only be taking notes in the Notes section on the right. This is where you take normal notes on the bigger concepts with supporting detail as concisely as possible.

Record as much as possible in the right column, as you just want to capture information at this point.

you filter and analyze the Notes side and write the important parts on the Cues side.

the Cues side is a relatively organized account of the topic at hand—basically, the same information is on each side.

Summary section at the bottom. This is where you attempt to summarize everything you’ve just taken notes on into a few top-level ideas and statements,

Where you previously had one page full of messy notes, now you have a short Summary section where you can instantly gain understanding of new information.

four stages of learning: taking notes, editing, analysis, reflection. Cornell notes force you to go through all four stages and help you organize information better with three sections to enforce information.

The most important part is that you’ve created something that has personal significance to you because you’ve phrased everything in a way in which you derive meaning. You are making the information fit your mental scheme, not the other way around.

Peter Brown, author of the book Make It Stick, simplifies this point on notes: he maintains that when no effort is put into the learning process, it doesn’t last very long.

Your notes are how your brain will process, understand, and memorize information.