220. Study Motivation and the U Shaped Curve

Everything's a u shaped curve: don't work too hard, but not too little either, for best results.

Explore how understanding this "sweet spot" principle can help you find the balance in your study routine, as well as get the right balance in other areas of your study strategy too, such as how many spaced repetitions are optimal for you, or the right mix of different study methods for your needs. 

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Hosted by William Wadsworth, memory psychologist, independent researcher and study skills coach. I help ambitious students to study smarter, not harder, so they can ace their exams with less work and less stress.

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Transcript

elcome And Why Balance Matters

William Wadsworth 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Expert Podcast. I'm your host, William Wadsworth, speaker, author, and all around useful guy to help you study smarter and ace your exams. A perennial theme on the podcast over the years is getting the balance right in our studies. Getting the balance right. If we don't study too much, I think we'd all agree that we are underprepared and we underperform. But if we go too far the other way and study so intensely and so frantically, burn ourselves out and end up in an exhausted puddle on the floor, then we underperform too because we're too tired and burned out to make any effective progress. Although there's nothing left in the tank come an exam day when we can't think properly in the exam because we're so completely exhausted. So the relationship between the time we put into our studies and our performance in the final exam is a U-shaped curve. An upside-down U-shaped curve. You have time studied along the x-axis, along the horizontal axis, the amount of time you put into your studies, and then on the y-axis, we have our performance, our exam scores. So picture an upside-down letter U, like a hill or a mountain, uh at either extreme of the x-axis, the curve is low. These extremes are what we just talked about, where we're either not studying much at all or studying way too much and leading to low performance. As we move towards the middle of the x-axis, the hill rises up, the hill slopes up from both ends, reaching a peak in the middle, representing a sweet spot. That's the highest level of performance that comes from the optimum amount of studying. So not too much, not too little, but this right spot in the middle. That idea of a sweet spot in the middle. It's the old adage of the Goldilocks effect, isn't it? You know, one porish was too hot, one was too cold, one was just right. Uh, this is what we're looking for here, that just right amount of work. So recognizing where we are on the curve, I think is a really important step for any scholar. We've been talking about metacognition, that kind of awareness of how things are going, our strengths, weaknesses, what we need to prioritize over the past few episodes on the podcast. Um and uh this kind of recognition of this, you know, where we are on this curve, that's that's an example of metacognition in action, that kind of awareness of how much we're working and what's optimal for us. To give you just some real-world flavor on this, in the clients that that I work with in my coaching practice, I'd say maybe about a quarter uh need some help climbing that first part of the curve and increasing their study hours from below optimum or or non-at all to a more optimum level through working on their motivation, consistent routine and so forth. Uh and this kind of work tends to be more common among my school-age clients. Um so it's much more common among my school-age clients that some, definitely not all, some of my school-age clients are extremely driven, extremely conscientious when they when they meet me. Uh, but but but quite often uh there's a bit of work to do together to help build that intrinsic motivation and consistency to start with. That tends to be much less the case when I'm talking to one of my professional clients. Uh, you know, say a student taking an advanced uh not a student, a professional taking an advanced medical, veterinary med or finance exam, for example. Work ethic for professionals tends to be much less of an issue, though for some it can definitely still be a massive challenge. Um, and we'll work on that together. Um, but I'd say for the majority of professionals, it tends to be, if anything, our risk is kind of going too far the other way and working so hard that we end up uh burning ourselves out and and we almost need to just just rein ourselves in a little bit. And and and the thing we need to develop is that is that is that is that comfort and that patience uh and not try and tackle it all today. Just work at a steady, balanced pace and realize that in the long run, that is the route to highest productivity and highest performance. So I'm not just wanting to talk about your work ethic today, I think it's really interesting to look at how the U-shape curve can apply to other areas of our studies too. Um, so at this time of year, I'm talking to students here in the UK almost every single day through my either my speaking work in schools or my private coaching work, uh, and they're all gearing up for their big GCC or A-level exams this summer. Uh, and so when it comes to choosing our approach to learning and the study methods we're choosing, especially in these final weeks ahead of a big exam season, we see U-shaped curves once again. So this is not so much thinking about your work ethic as the revision methods and how we're going about the studying itself. So let's take one example. Let's think about the proportion of time that we're spending on, for example, past paper practice versus other learning approaches, like for example, flashcards. I think this is a U-shaped curve too. So at one extreme, if we do sort of 100% of our time on flashcards and 0% on past papers, then we'll underperform in the exam because we'll be underpractised on exam technique and we want to develop those skills that's applying our knowledge and understanding to the exam. Sometimes I'll meet students that say, Oh, flashcards don't work for me because they don't teach me how to apply stuff to the kind of questions I'll face in the exam. Well, that's not the purpose of a flashcard. The purpose of a flashcard is to learn the underlying course content and build that understanding, those kind of uh foundation blocks of the course. We then also need to layer on top of that the exam practice to make sure we've got the skills to apply our knowledge in the exam. So we need a bit of both. But on the other extreme, if we just do the past papers, we don't do any kind of underlying knowledge work with, for example, flashcards, there are other tools we can use for that as well. We might end up with crucial gaps in our course knowledge and understanding. Just bashing away at past papers is not a way to systematically learn the entire course. Past papers are quite lumpy. There's things that come up the whole time in your past paper practice that you end up over practicing. There's some things that come up, you know, rarely that you might not get enough practice on. And there might be some things that have never come up in the past papers that you don't end up practicing at all. So we don't just exclusively want to do past papers. We need a mix. We need it, we need that blend. The sweet spot lies in the middle of the curve with that mix, that smart mix of the different approaches. Uh, and and by the way, that where that sweet spot is is going to be a little bit different for everyone, and it kind of depends on how your learning is going. So if you're in a situation where you're looking at exams a few weeks off, and there's still, like if we're honest, there's still a lot we don't know yet, there's still an awful lot we don't know yet, then we might have more flashcards or other kind of learning memory tools in the mix to make sure we've kind of uh learned as much as we can in the remaining time. Um on going the other direction, if we actually know like most of the course now, and it's really just about practicing, applying it to the exam, getting it down in the time, uh, how we structure our answers, etc., then the more we'll lean the other direction and do more of the past paper practice in the mix. So it's a sweet spot, it's an upshade, down, U-shaped curve with a sweet spot of the balance in the middle. Uh, not too much of one thing, not too much of the other, but the right mix for you and your circumstances. Let's take one other example. So, one of the things that people uh and sometimes teachers, if I'm training teachers, often ask is kind of how many spaced repetitions do we need? So we often talk about the principle of spaced learning on the podcast. So, this idea that we don't just want to do things once, we want to kind of repeat them a couple of times. Well, like that sounds pretty vague. Like specifically, how many times and how often? Like, what does the science say? Well, there's I don't think there's a definitive answer here to it from the science because it's gonna vary, it's gonna be quite personal. Um, you know, whether we look at things two, three, five, ten times, uh, as you probably guessed by now, I think it's once again a U-shaped curve, and it's you know where the right sweet spot is is a little bit personal. So let's just look at that U-shaped curve. So so on the one extreme end, if we do too few repetitions, we don't repeat and do enough space repetition, um, then the material doesn't stick and we haven't learned it properly. But if we go too far the other way and do too many repetitions, then we might end up knowing that particular topic super, super well. We know it inside out. But that comes at the cost of practicing other topics, and we might not get through everything uh in time, or we might run out of time for that crucial exam style practice, and we've done the flashcard work really, really thoroughly, for example, but then we've run out of time to do the past paper practice, and so we haven't we're run to practice on kind of how to apply that knowledge and understanding to the exam itself. Now again, this balance is, as I mentioned a moment ago, it's it's it's personal, it's individual. So if you find the material generally kind of quite challenging to learn, it's perhaps quite abstract, it doesn't kind of relate closely to other things you've got to know you you know already. It might need more rounds of repetition, it might need more rounds of space learning. Um, and similarly, if your exam is a long way off, uh, you know, your time horizon is is quite wide, you know, you're preparing for an exam not next week, but next year, then over that time you'll probably need more rounds of space repetition, kind of over that time uh to make sure you you kind of uh are exam ready uh, you know, when the exam comes around, a year off. So kind of different circumstances will will impact like what the right answer is in terms of how many repetitions uh are right for you. So I just want to share um a little bit of a little bit of an anecdote. So sometimes potential coaching clients um who are interested in working with me, or possibly more often, uh their parents uh who might be putting the bill ask me, uh you know, email me to ask, well, you know, interested in working together, could you list the strategies that they will be learning in their sessions? Um and are there any are you know are these the same strategies that I teach on the podcast? And could I just learn them from listening to the podcast? Which which kind of always makes my heart sink a little bit. Like my coaching work is not just about sitting and talking you through a bunch of one size fits all study strategies. Many of my clients come to me and are already familiar with a lot of the important strategies from listening to the podcast. Some clients need a little bit of a reminder, or perhaps you're relatively new to some of the ideas, or perhaps there's sort of a few like little misconceptions we can address, which is completely fine. We'll do that at your own pace. Some students need a little bit more on those foundations, some we can go through it pretty quickly if you're familiar with the fundamentals. But the real value of the coaching work we do together is in these kinds of nuanced but very impactful conversations about how to best apply the different strategies and principles in your specific circumstances. Where do you fit on that U-shape curve for all these different elements we've talked about? Getting the right balance, the right routine, the right blend of different study strategies, the right spaced, space, spaced repetition schedule, and more. All the right answers, the right kind of balance uh for your specific needs and situations. So I'm really passionate about the work I do. Uh, I have a very long track record of getting outstanding results for many hundreds of clients over many, many years. So if you would like to get a little personalized support in preparing for exams, uh please do check out my coaching work at examstudy experts.com forward slash coaching. Uh, and you can join around 300 podcast listeners over the years uh who've worked with me one-on-one to overhaul or simply fine-tune their approach to studying and have ended up getting results they're really delighted with in their big exams. And as I've hinted, that's a mix of students who are at school taking the big exams or perhaps at university. And also I work with a lot of professionals, uh, time for professionals preparing for challenging exams, particularly in fields like medicine or finance. The coaching process starts with an obligation consultation over Zoom where we can talk about how your studying is going and explore how I can best support you in your particular circumstances. At time of broadcasting, I'm now fully booked for new clients for the remainder of this month, uh, even with offering extended coaching hours for the next few weeks. Uh, so my next available consultation slots are open again uh in just a couple of weeks' time at the start of April. So you can book yourself in for a chat uh start of April today at examstudy experts.com forward slash coaching. Just follow the links from there to book in your no obligation consult with me today. And it'd be a real pleasure to meet and have a little bit of chat about how things are going for you. And with that, that's a wrap for today, folks. I hope there's some interesting food for thought today. Perhaps even getting the gears turning on where this principle of everything's a U-shaped curve might apply in other areas of your life as well. I'd like to offer a credit to the blogger Pete Adney for the inspiration for today's theme and from his 2020 blog article, The Sweet Spot, which was mainly about how this principle of everything's a U-shaped curve and and and you know getting the balance right as a sweet spot in the middle, uh, applies in the world of your own finances. Uh, and that in turn got me thinking about how extensively this principle applies in your study and exam prep habits as well. So thank you for tuning in today. Uh, I hope you've enjoyed today's episode, and I look forward to catching you next time when we'll be looking at how to regulate our emotions as students with the help of the wonderful Dr. Jen Veyu. Uh, it's gonna be a cracker of an interview with tons of handy practical ideas we can all use to help us feel calmer and happier, even when things get a little bit bumpy along the road. So I'll really look forward to seeing you then. In the meantime, look out for getting that balance right, and remember, it's all about studying smarter, not necessarily harder. Wishing you every success in your studies.

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