Teachers, tutors, and professors always say review: review your mistakes, review the slides, review the textbook. But what does this really mean? They can’t possibly mean that one should simply reread an explanation, slide, or chapter.
Take practice problems for the MCAT for example. UWorld is the gold standard, a question bank full of 3000+ practice problems. On top of these problems, UWorld provides amazing explanations for each answer choice on each practice problem. Reading these explanations is enough to count as reviewing, right? If only it were that easy. Our minds work incredibly differently from one person to the next. Your approach to a topic may be completely different than mine, yet we may both arrive at the same correct understanding. Your own approach to a topic may differ by the day, or the setting, or by how much coffee you have consumed. Thus, our reviewing must mirror the countless ways one can tackle a topic. That UWorld explanation may be sufficient for one person, but not for another.
I often find myself reading explanations, reading textbooks, watching videos, looking at diagrams, drawing it out for myself, and reading research papers on the topic. By tackling a topic from countless directions, you are able to see it through different lenses. These lenses may not be incredibly different from each other. However, each one adds at least some positive impact to my understanding of a topic. I find that the most successful students are those who actively engage with a multifaceted approach to studying. There are so many brilliant people in the world, many of whom have written and recorded amazing textbooks and lectures on any topic you can imagine. So why limit your learning to just one resource?
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