Strategies in learning physics

[Cygni]

Dear PF readers,

I have finished my first year physics at university and will start my second year in the beginning of this autumn. Whilst my exam results for this year were excellent, I am not completely satisfied with my methods of learning - I personally think there are more efficient methods to learn the material.

My learning strategy is usually go to lectures, make lectures notes (standard compulsory thing for everyone who does physics I think), then come back to the halls, do quite a bit of private study which usually involves reading the material I learned that day and writing up a very detailed summary of that material. Unfortunately this process is time consuming and usually things like coursework and lab reports are in my way so I do fall behind this and usually have to catch up much later (during half term when I prepare for my exams). Now when the exam time comes I start my revision roughly 5 weeks before my first exam. The strategy I employ there is try to finish my revision guides for each module and do lots of questions from the course books and exam papers. Everyday I assign a different topic to revise, read through the home - made revision guides and then do lots of practice questions.

I realize that once you learn a topic conceptually you have to reinforce it by doing a lot of practice questions - I think this is quite a vital factor since you learn how to apply the concepts to solve physical problems. The problem that I have with this strategy is that I produce a lot of work in terms of writing it down on paper. You may think there is nothing wrong with that, but the amount that I write I feel like I am destroying an entire forest. And I don't want to throw that work away, so it accumulates. (I have this weird idea that if I throw it away it will leave my brain haha i know... but also I like to keep it to for the sake of something to remember).

For the second academic year I was planning to get a tablet laptop with a digitizer pen so I could do all the work in it including taking lecture notes. This would have saved me an immense amount of space and trees :D. However, in the end I decided not to buy it due to the cost - 1.5k for a lenovo thinkpad x220t is slightly out of my student budget. I am still considering in buying a dictaphone to record the lectures, however, I am not sure if it would be beneficial, so I would like to hear from anyone whose done it. I feel like what I do in lectures is not enough so I want to utilise the lecture time a bit more.

So just to sum up, I am just trying to find ways to make my learning a bit more efficient and effective.

I would love to hear how you learn physics and which aspects of your learning strategy are the most effective. I also would appreciate any comments/criticisms on my strategy of learning.

Thanks in advance,

Kind regards,

Cygni.

 

[Goldbeetle]

Do you collect your solutions to the exercises? They are good to keep and re-read in the run up to the exams.

Also, very important is to repeat aloud the material as if holding a lecture.

Group study is also important. If you know more, the fact itself to explain things to a fellow student who struggles refines your knowledge.

 

[Cygni]

Do you collect your solutions to the exercises? They are good to keep and re-read in the run up to the exams.

Also, very important is to repeat aloud the material as if holding a lecture.

Group study is also important. If you know more, the fact itself to explain things to a fellow student who struggles refines your knowledge.

Hey Goldbeetle, thanks for the reply

I do collect all of my solutions to the exercises, the problem with this is that I do quite a lot of them so they accumulate in a great amount, I want to find ways how I could do the same amount of questions, have them saved but save the space.

The group study suggestion sounds good, I will be living with a few physicists this coming academic year so that is a viable option. Thanks.

 

[Goldbeetle]

Well, not only exercises! First one must understand the theory. Exercises normally reinforce learning.

 

[keinerniemand]

The problem that I have with this strategy is that I produce a lot of work in terms of writing it down on paper. You may think there is nothing wrong with that, but the amount that I write I feel like I am destroying an entire forest. And I don't want to throw that work away, so it accumulates. (I have this weird idea that if I throw it away it will leave my brain haha i know... but also I like to keep it to for the sake of something to remember).

For the second academic year I was planning to get a tablet laptop with a digitizer pen so I could do all the work in it including taking lecture notes. This would have saved me an immense amount of space and trees :D. However, in the end I decided not to buy it due to the cost - 1.5k for a lenovo thinkpad x220t is slightly out of my student budget.

Have you considered getting a scanner and writing on transparencies with a non-permanent pen? This way you no longer use up any paper and you can wipe off mistakes you make. And it's cheap!

 

[Daverz]

Well, not only exercises! First one must understand the theory. Exercises normally reinforce learning.

One is not going to understand all the theory before attempting the exercises. Often you'll only really understand something after struggling with the exercises for a while. I would work through the material in the text and notes with pen and paper first, though, filling in the missing steps in the derivations.

 

[Cygni]

Have you considered getting a scanner and writing on transparencies with a non-permanent pen? This way you no longer use up any paper and you can wipe off mistakes you make. And it's cheap!

This a brilliant idea, I will definately try this, thanks very much!

 

[micromass]

Hi Cygni!

I never studied physics, but I have some methods to efficiently learn mathematics, maybe they can be of some help to you.

When I was studying and when I asked questions to my professor, I noticed that they could always give concise explanations of the definitions and the concepts in the course. So what I tried (quite succesfully) is to give one-sentence descriptions of all the definitions and the concepts.

Basically, whenever you encounter a concept, think about it and try to give a complete description of it in only one sentence. Don't go into technical details and try to convey the meaning behind the term. Thinking about such a things greatly expanded my conceptual knowledge. Of course, the one-line descriptions changed over time. As a simple example, I first described an integral as an anti-derivative, but later you may want to describe it as an area or some kind of "averaging operation".

The benefit of doing it was (to me) that I thought about the conceptional things and about the meaning of things. Moreover, I could use the list of definitions a day before the exam to refresh everything.

Try to expland the method: give short (one-line) descriptions of all the proofs and derivations, of the chapter, and even try to do it for the entire course.