Text
| Acquiring new knowledge. In all learning, advances tend to come irregularly and in bursts, as you gain fresh insights into the subject. In order to obtain these insights you must thoroughly understand what you are studying. If you really understand a subject not only do you remember it easily, but you can apply your know ledge in new situations. The important thing is not what you know, but what you can do with what you know. The extra effort involved in getting a firm grounding in the essentials of a subject is repaid many times in later study. How are you to achieve understanding? Understanding involves (1) linking new knowledge to the old and (2) organizing it and remembering it in a systematic fashion. To retain and make sense of any new concept or fact it must be linked in as many ways as possible to your existing body of knowledge. All good introductory textbooks are constantly giving familiar examples, or using analogies, or appealing to common experience. In setting out the differences between daylight vision and twilight vision, for example, most writers point out that as twilight falls in the garden, blue flowers remain blue for some time after red blossoms appear black, illustrating, by appeal to common experience, that under dim illumination the colours of the blue end of the spectrum become relatively brighter than those of the red end. Or again, to illustrate that the movement of any particular electron during the passage of an electric current is only a few centimetres a second, although the velocity of the current is extremely great, the analogy is often used of a truck run into the end of a long line of trucks in a shunting yard, a corresponding truck being rapidly ejected from the far end. Linking new information to familiar experience in this fashion always helps understanding. In order to tie the new information to your stock of knowledge with as many links as possible, you must reflect on it, and try and relate it to what you already know. Thinking the matter over by yourself, writing out summaries of the main points, and talking to other students about it, are all valuable for fixing it more clearly in your mind.' How to Study, Maddox (Pan) |