Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Cramming

Episode Date: December 9, 2020

Cramming is no way to study. Learn why in today's short stuff. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and on behalf of Chuck, who's here, say hi Chuck.

Hello. Dave C., the producer, and Jerry, the mega meta Uber producer, Uber with an umlaut even. Hi there. That was a good Jerry. This is short stuff. The stuff you should know, short version of stuff you should know, but shorter.

That's right, and this has to do with something that I have been guilty of from grades kindergarten through my undergraduate degree, which is to say cramming for the test. I've always procrastinated when it comes to my school testing. I always crammed, I always did pretty good. Yeah.

I was a B student, and I never thought it mattered much, and now I feel terrible about it. Right, until that time the cop pulled you over and asked you how to explain Pythagoras' theorem. And you were like, oh man, I knew this, I knew this and I forgot it. Yeah, because cramming is, it sort of works if you're looking to skate by and make that grade

and like walking in there minutes after you finished studying, you might do okay, but you're not gonna learn anything and you're not gonna remember that stuff. No, and that's the point, yes, you can cram and do okay on a test, you could even get through college or high school like that, and that's why a lot of people who cram say, well, whatever, it works, I'm fine with it, but the point

of learning all this stuff is to actually learn it. So when you look at it like that, like you don't actually learn anything, you just are doing rote memorization, and then it kind of makes sense to look for other ways, and luckily they figured out that there are plenty of other ways to learn aside from cramming. Before we get into that, let's talk about exactly

why cramming is terrible. Yeah, so obviously we're saying you're really not learning much, there have been studies done, and there are a lot of people who study this. One of these guys from the House of Works article is Dr. Robert A. Bjork from UCLA, Psychology Department, and he's like, there's a dramatic forgetting rate after you take that test,

and you might think, well, who cares, man? I've passed the test, but that's a big deal when that test is a building block for more lessons, like if it's a language class he points out, or math class, all of that stuff matters, you gotta learn that stuff. You can't cram, I mean, I guess you can cram for a language final or a language test,

but it's not gonna do any good when the next test comes around and you never learn the first stuff. Yeah, you'll never be a French major like that, you sap. Oh, what's sap in French? Sap-b-b? Ha ha ha! Perfect. And then the other part is, when you're cramming too,

usually you're adjusting your normal schedule to like really debilitating degree. Oh, sure, yeah. You're not cramming from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. the day before the test. studying. It's 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. Cramming usually involves like just like squeezing whatever time you have out of the handful of hours right before the test. Maybe you sleep for a little bit right before and then go in and take the test. In my experience, it's always

just been going in and taking the test right after you finish studying. Yeah, remember, God, just remember this, the family ties when Alex P. Keaton took speed. But it's so great. Every family sitcom has always had somebody take speed and it's always to study. Remember Jesse Spano? Uh, Jesse Spano. I'm saved by the bell where she's like, I'm so excited. I'm so excited. They were doing a performance of that song and she was like freaking out about getting it wrong. So she was rehearsing and rehearsing and taking speed. You're like, you're too fast. I don't remember. It's great. It's one of the watershed moments in television history. Jesse collapsing in Zach's arms because she's so excited.

But I think that show's coming back. It is. And the same stars are going to be like teachers. Amazing. Yeah. So cramming. Yeah, you cram right until the last second. No good. You're not learning long term. And there are some interesting ways to combat this though. And should we take a break now? Yeah, I think that's right. All right. It's a little early, but it's a perfect place. So we'll be right back. All right. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do,

you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Uh-huh. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Well now when

you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. All right. I jumped the gun. We took an early break, but here's the deal. If you want to study effectively, uh, they say that, you know, studying something twice is obviously the best way and even three times and more is the best way to retain something and really learn something. But, uh, it gets even more specific. It's called the spacing effect. They say if you study some and then you go and take a break and do something else and then come back to studying that same thing, you're going to retain even more than if you just did it twice in a row. That's right. So

this is like really, really important to remember because if you want to learn anything, there's just a certain thing you have to do and that is not cram. And like this could even be, I don't, I didn't see anywhere like how far spaced out it needs to be, but I got the impression that there's a sweet spot too far. And it's basically like seeing the material like brand new again. And you don't even remember the first time, but too close. And studies have shown that you actually, don't, uh, you don't see it differently than you did the time before. Like if you read a chapter and then go back and read the chapter again, you're not doing anything to help yourself. You want to space it out some. And in doing that, you're, they think you're, you're encoding things

differently. Yeah. So like you said, if you do something twice in a row, it's so familiar to you, you're encoding it in the exact same way. If you take that little break, you'll encode it differently and remember it longer. And, uh, not only that, but there are different ways to encode. Uh, and they suggest like changing your, um, like where you study. Like if you'd sit down in your favorite fat chair in your office to study your thing, take a little break, go to a different room for the second take, and that will just mix it up in your brain enough so you'll encode it more permanently. That's right. Um, so that's pretty cool. That's a, that's a good, good bit of advice. And there's, there's, there's other reasons why they think

this works, um, really well. Uh, another one is that like if you struggle to recall, um, whatever the information is, for some reason, your, that, that exertion of brain power, um, makes you learn it more. And there's just, there's a pretty good example in this article from House of Forks where like if you meet somebody, um, and you have to remember their name like 30 seconds later, that's great. You'll probably remember their name cause it's right there in your working memory, but the next day you're probably not going to remember it. But if you like you meet somebody and then an hour later you have to recall their name and you really try to recall it, you're probably going to remember it the next day because they think you're struggling with that

recall. You're exerting an effort with recall and it makes sense because you know, if you're like, what's that person's name again and you don't even bother to try to recall, um, you will, you're not, you're not going to learn it. Or if you, even if you ask the person what their name is over and over again and you're not just getting it in there, um, you're, you're never going to learn it either. So it makes sense. Struggle, struggle to recall might help with this, uh, this learning thing. Yeah. I'm the worst with names like that. And I've tried, I know we both are, we, I've tried all the things. I try to remember to think of pneumatic devices, pneumonic devices, pneumatic. And, uh, I just can't do it. So you hear a lot of, Hey, man, out of me. And it's

no offense. I never forget a personality or a face. So you're encoded. It's just those names. I think everyone should wear name tags. Uh, but they've done plenty of studies about this. There was one in 2009 from UCLA from Dr. Nate Cornell with a K and found that spacing was more effective than cramming for 90 per 90% of participants, which is, I mean, there it is. There's your proof. Well, yeah. But the thing is they also surveyed those participants and found out that basically all of them still thought cramming was effective. And the reason why is because it is effective, but it's not effective for long-term learning. So what they figured out in addition to spacing, um, that spacing is, uh, well, I guess in kind of in conjunction with

spacing is another technique that really helps people learn. And it's called interleaving. I think it should be called interweaving, but whatever. Yeah, that's weird. It's where you take, you know, uh, let's say you have two hours to study, uh, math, you're actually better off to study math for 30 minutes, then go study say French or something else for another 30 minutes. Just interleave it. Yeah. And then, right. And then study, um, model airplane building for 30 minutes and then go back to the math. You're going to do better than you did if you spent two solid hours on math, just even by breaking it up, which is very counterintuitive because it seems like you'd be distracted, but Hey man, the studies don't lie. Yeah. There was a 2015 study

that tested middle school kids, uh, with algebra and geometry to subjects at a very hard time with. And a day after their lesson was complete, uh, the students who enter wove or interloave scored 25% better than students who got regular instruction. And then here's the real kicker. A month later, that interleaving group was up 76%. And that's kind of the whole point, which is like long-term learning something rather than just recalling something for a test. Right. Yeah. That's, there's your proof right there. 76% after a month is that's all I needed to hear. So from now on it's interleaving and encoding, uh, and spacing for me. Yeah. And I try to do that because our job is sort of like taking a test in a way.

Oh yeah, totally. And I've gotten into, and I know we both have our own sort of methods worked out now, but, um, I've gotten into a groove now where I will read stuff like on the laptop and then not look at it for a bit and then read and highlight the printed version and then leave it for a bit and then eventually underline the key parts on the highlighted printed version. And that in addition to just general like, you know, videos and other like ways of learning, that's kind of the sweet spot for me. Yeah. Because you're spacing it out and that's, it works. Yeah. I know writing something down has always been a suggestion. Like if you write it out, then you're more likely to remember it. That's a big thing. Oh yeah, for sure. Like

if there's a very difficult concept that we have to explain, it's way easier to write it out. Yeah, you've always done that. Because on one hand you're like proving to yourself that you understand it, but you're also definitely like re-encoding it in a different way. And the other thing I find interesting too is if you actually physically move to like a different room or a different location or something like that, um, just being surrounded by that different stuff or different sounds, different smells, different sights, even when you're learning the exact same information, your brain is encoding it in a different way. I just find that endlessly fascinating. And it makes total sense too. Yeah. And I've always, you know, seen over the years when you

sit across from me, your signature, uh, Josh Clark, uh, three point chicken scratch handwriting no one else on the planet can see without a magnifying glass or read even with a magnifying glass. Yeah, I sometimes can't. I'm like, what did I say here? But the point is it's not even to go back and reread. Almost never is. If it is, then I make it super legible. It's just writing it out. Help me remember it, you know? Yeah, it's good stuff. We have our tricks. Well, that's it. Go forth and stop cramming everybody. You will be a more well-rounded, happier, smarter human being, okay? Okay. And since I said okay twice, it's the end of short stuff and short stuff away. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.