Advance Praise for the Concise Learning Method

“shows you in a step-by-step manner how to become a more engaged, efficient, and effective learner”

-Michael J. Gelb, author of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci

“teaches the students to transform information into meaningful knowledge”

-Jerome Bruner, author of Culture of Education

“gets right to the heart of learning how to learn and engaging your whole brain”

-Dominic O'Brien, eight-time world memory champion and author of How to Develop a Brilliant Memory Week by Week

“compendium of enormously helpful information on how to learn more successfully”

-Dee Dickinson, author of Teaching and Learning Through Multiple Intelligence

“helps students become more analytical and critical thinkers, enabling them to learn independently and meaningfully”

-Bena Kallick, co-author of Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind

“enables you to break free from depending on others to becoming a competent and independent learner.”

-Douglas Fisher, author of Better Learning Through Structured Teaching

Read more testimonials at
http://conciselearning.com/educationexperts.html.

Copyright © 2012 by Concise Books Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the publisher. For more information, contact info@conciselearning.com.

This book includes information from many sources and was gathered from many personal experiences. It is published for general reference and is not intended to be a substitute for independent verification by readers when necessary and appropriate. Learning is not an exact science; therefore, even reputable learning methods and programs cannot guarantee exact results. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional when appropriate. Although the author and publisher have prepared this book with utmost care and diligence and have made every effort to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the information contained within, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, inconsistencies, or results obtained from use of this book. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The publisher and author disclaim any personal liability for any loss or any other damages, direct or indirect, resulting from the advice and information presented within. For more information, contact info@conciselearning.com.

Readers should be aware that Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared since the book was written. To report such problems, please contact info@conciselearning.com.

Cartoons by Ron Leishman.
All visual maps were drawn using Mindjet MindManager.
eBook formatting by Atritex Technologies Private Limited.

Visit our Web site at www.conciselearning.com.

To the thousands of students who have helped me develop, test, refine, put into practice, and spread the word about the Concise Learning method (CLM) explained in this book.

To my wife Lindita, my love and extraordinary partner in life and work.

To my kids, George and Julianna, my inspiration and joy, who remind me every day how important it is to be a lifelong learner.

To my family, for their encouragement and support throughout my life.

Table of Contents

Preface

How to Use This Book

Chapter 1: Introduction to Concise Learning Method (CLM)

1. 1 The Need to Learn Better

1. 2 CLM: In a Nutshell

1. 3 CLM: The Benefits

1. 4 Does CLM Work?

1. 5 Will CLM Work for Me?

1. 6 Additional Resources

Chapter 2: Visual Maps: What They Are & How You Draw Them

2. 1 Introduction

2. 2 Benefits and Uses of Visual Mapping

2. 3 How to Draw Visual Maps

2. 4 Visual Mapping Computer Programs

2. 5 Additional Resources

Chapter 3: Concise Learning Method (CLM)

3. 1 What’s Your Learning Strategy?

3. 2 CLM: The Strategy

3. 3 CLM: The 4 Repeating Steps within Each Phase

3. 4 CLM: The 5Ps Process

3. 5 Summary

3. 6 Additional Resources

Chapter 4: Applying CLM to Your Life

4. 1 CLM: Your Way to Effective and Efficient Learning

4. 2 The Missing Ingredient: YOU

4. 3 Your Future Is NOW

4. 4 You Can’t Be Successful Without Lifelong Learning

4. 5 Success Is a Way of Living

4. 6 Additional Resources

Bonus Chapter: Lifelong Learning with CLM

6.1 Why a Chapter on Lifelong Learning?

6.2 Professionals Are Students, Too

6.3 Importance of Lifelong Learning

6.4 Lifelong Learning in the Digital Age

6.5 Developing Your Personal Learning Network (PLN)

6.6 Design Your Personal Learning Plan

6.7 Why Use CLM for Lifelong Learning?

6.8 How to Use CLM for Lifelong Learning?

6.9 What To Do Next

6.10 References

Appendices

Your Visual Map Worksheet

Learning Components

Case Study

Afterword

References

Thank You

PREFACE

How Are You Learning?

Learning is about immersing yourself in the mystery of new information so you can explore it, discover it, understand it, apply it, and create new information for others and knowledge for yourself. That’s what makes learning such an exciting and fun adventure.

To be a successful learner, you must have some basic training on how to learn. You know you’re on the right path when you’re actively observing and discovering, asking and answering questions, thinking, understanding and retaining what you’re learning, applying what you’ve learned, and, most importantly, feeling engaged and interested.

Students Are Unprepared for College

Every year, millions of students transition from high school to college. Often, these students find themselves overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to assimilate in college and stymied by the lack of guidance, something they were accustomed to receiving in high school.

The statistics are downright troubling.

Of U.S. undergraduates who enroll at a four-year college seeking a degree, only 36 percent achieve this goal within four years. Fifty-eight percent obtain a bachelor’s degree within six years.1

The completion rate for students enrolling in two-year institutions is even more sobering, where only 38.4 percent of students had earned a degree six years later.2

These findings demonstrate the urgent need for more effective learning where students are engaged, motivated, and empowered to learn. Will you be ready for college when the semester comes at you like a freight train?

Studying ≠ Learning

Let’s face it: schools tell you what to learn but not how to learn. Although the amount of information you’re expected to learn has dramatically increased, you’re left on your own to figure out how to learn, mostly through trial-and-error studying. Studying, however, is not the same as learning. Simply rereading the same material over and over again is not the answer. I wrote this book so students like you can learn how to learn.

Everyone Can Learn How to Learn

Today, students are arriving at colleges unable to think through problems, learn fundamental subjects, and do well on basic exams. It’s not that college subjects cannot be learned; it’s that students have never been taught how to learn. This is the missing step in our schools.

Concise Learning will teach you to master the art of learning. That’s right; learning is an art that you can master. Understand this: learning is more a function of process than aptitude. It’s more about how you learn than how smart you are. This means that it’s up to you, not your genes, to determine how well you learn and the grades you get.

Results You Can Expect from This Book

Concise Learning is about turning studying into learning and about turning information into knowledge. This book will teach you how to make this significant transformation in your studies through a learning method that involves visual mapping, critical thinking, and problem solving.

Don’t worry; this isn’t a book on learning theory. Rather, this book will provide you with a simple and intuitive, yet proven and powerful, method for learning and managing multiple sources of information.

You’ll learn to:

Visually organize and integrate information, ideas, and concepts.

Think clearly, critically, and powerfully.

Learn meaningfully through active, cognitive, and constructive processes.

Learn more effectively, resulting in improved learning and grades.

Learn more efficiently, leaving you plenty of time and energy to pursue other interests.

Not only acquire knowledge but also produce knowledge.

Join the Top Ranks of Highly Successful Students

Everyone has the capacity to get As. What you need are simple changes in how you learn. Concise Learning is your easy-to-read and engaging guide to academic success, teaching you how to learn. This book will serve you as a learning blueprint that you can apply immediately.

Thousands of students have already gained control over their learning with the Concise Learning method (CLM) presented in this book and have successfully transitioned from a state of freshman anxiety and insecurity to one of independence, confidence, enjoyment, and success. I know you can do the same.

Welcome to the exciting and fun adventure of learning. With Concise Learning, your education and career goals are within reach.

Toni Krasnic

profTK@conciselearning.com

www.conciselearning.com

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Terminology and Definitions

“CL” refers to this book — Concise Learning.

“CLM” refers to the Concise Learning method.

Reading the Visual Maps

Read visual maps clockwise from top right and from top to bottom.

KINDLE NOTE: If a diagram in the Kindle is difficult to see, you can enlarge it by first moving the cursor down once so that it's to the left of the diagram, then moving the cursor right once to highlight the diagram, and finally pressing the cursor once to enlarge the diagram. When done viewing the enlarged diagram, press the cursor again to return to the normal screen.

Order of Chapters 2 (Visual Mapping) and 3 (CLM)

The order of chapters 2 and 3 are interchangeable.

If you’re already familiar with visual mapping, you can skip Chapter 2 and go directly to Chapter 3.

If you prefer to read about the visual mapping tool before the learning method that uses the tool, begin with Chapter 2 and then read Chapter 3.

If you prefer to read about the learning method before the visual mapping tool that’s used in the method, begin with Chapter 3 and then read Chapter 2.

Learn the CLM

CLM is your key to better learning and better grades. As you start implementing the CLM, your learning will increase. As you master the CLM, your learning will skyrocket. Refer to this diagram for a quick synopsis of the method.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION TO
CONCISE LEARNING

METHOD (CLM)

1.1 The Need to Learn Beter

Learning is a central human activity and has important implications for school, career, and life. It is the foundation for success in and enjoyment of life. Now consider this: in all of your years of attending school, did anyone ever teach you how to learn? Probably not. This book will teach you how.

Complaints, Complaints, and More Complaints

For nearly a decade, I’ve taught college chemistry at various institutions. While teaching, I always did my best to give students guidance and direction. Regardless of where I taught, at two-year community colleges or prestigious four-year universities, students expressed similar complaints:

Information overload.

Inability to learn the required information.

Not enough time to get anything done right.

These complaints didn’t surprise me. After all, I’ve seen first-hand how students are expected to learn more at ever increasing rates. Helping students overcome the dilemma of balancing time constraints and daunting amounts of information with true learning became my central mission while teaching.

What Works and What Doesn’t, According to Students

As I set out to develop a learning method that was both effective (increasing what you learn) and efficient (learning quickly and with minimal effort), I recruited from the experts — students themselves. Before asking them a single question, however, I made it clear that all students can be effective and efficient learners; it’s just a matter of learning how to learn. Given that fundamental premise, their responses transitioned from complaints to recommendations. Their insight into what works and what doesn’t work provided the foundation for my learning method.

My experience with students shows that the most significant difference between struggling students and highly successful ones is that struggling students get bogged down in unfocused and unproductive reading, copying, and repetition, instead of focusing on key concepts and the pursuit of a complete picture, which really drives successful learning.

With so much to learn, you simply can’t absorb everything. Some information will be lost. What’s really important is that you have control over what information gets lost and what gets retained.

Struggling students: Rather than aiming for learning, they are preoccupied with trying to absorb all information. Because the information never gets processed into long-term memory but simply gets dumped into short-term memory, their brains get overwhelmed and subconsciously filter out much of the information, including the most important things.

Highly successful students: They apply an information filter early in the learning process because they know they can’t possibly absorb all of the information presented, nor do they have to. They select what is important to learn. They make a conscious decision to absorb only the key concepts, which in turn enables them to learn the course material better and faster and to be able to apply it to other areas of learning as well.

Everyone Can Be an Excellent Student

From students’ responses, it is apparent that being an excellent learner is an acquired skill. It’s all about the learning method and your skills, not your innate ability. No one is born knowing how to learn, and most students are never taught how to learn, so it’s no wonder that trial-and-error studying prevails.

Many students just need a better approach to learning to be successful — a less linear, more effective method. The Concise Learning method is that better approach.

1.2 CLM: In a Nutshell

CLM: The Overview

In CLM, you treat the subject of interest as a puzzle you’re trying to solve. Since real-life puzzles don’t come in neat boxes with the final picture and all the pieces, you need to ask some key questions about existing and missing pieces. As you find the missing pieces, you then organize and connect them with existing pieces, an activity that requires critical thinking.

CLM is a visual, flexible, meaningful, and systematic approach to effective and efficient learning through the use of an active, cognitive, inquiry-based, and constructive process. CLM enables you to break free from passive and dull memorization.

With CLM, learning is achieved via a five-phase process (looking for puzzle pieces) that involves meaningfully organizing and connecting key concepts in a visual map (putting together the puzzle pieces), critically thinking, and asking key questions.

That’s it! Welcome to the new, better, faster, and more fun way of learning.

CLM: The Summary

CLM is easy to use, intuitive, and systematic. Anyone can use it, and the most successful students already do.

Say goodbye to linear processing and hello to free-form learning. CLM allows you to readily consolidate information from multiple sources and look at it from multiple perspectives in a highly visual, interactive format. 3 Further, it allows you to process the information as you encounter it rather than waiting for all of the “puzzle pieces” to fall into place. This free-form learning allows the brain to merge logic and creativity to enable maximum learning.

Every devoted student wants to think and learn better. CLM is a way to achieve both and more, as shown in the VERY IMPORTANT DIAGRAM below. The five phases and the four steps are summarized in the pages that follow this diagram.

The 5Ps — the five phases of learning — and the 4 steps within each of the 5Ps guide your thought processes as you’re learning. Together, they provide a flexible, meaningful, and systematic approach to cultivating:

Content organization, connection, and integration into a visual map by recognizing different levels within the text (i.e., key concepts and supporting details).

Increased capacity to receive information, transform information into knowledge, learn, and be able to apply what you’ve learned to exams and to generate new ideas.

Better memory by having breaks between phases, giving your brain time to sort, connect, process, and rehearse information. The phase breaks also serve to increase interest and level of concentration.

Critical thinking by organizing and connecting the information in a clear and meaningful way.

Inquiry and problem solving, driven by critical thinking.

Learning through active, cognitive, and constructive processes.

CLM: How Well You Think Determines How Well You Learn

The foundation of CLM is based on the premise that you learn best when you think about what you’re learning. This sounds obvious, but many college students are still simply memorizing bits of information.

The quality of thinking, in turn, is determined by the quality of the key questions you ask and attempt to answer as you’re learning. When you’re not asking key questions, your mind wanders, your thoughts scatter, and you can’t identify key concepts essential to your understanding of the subject material.

CLM’s power lies in its ability to make large amounts of information manageable through the 5Ps process and in helping you visually map that information. Mapping allows for better organization and clearer connections so you can think better and probe more. With time, CLM becomes intuitive and second nature, fostering your lifelong thinking and learning.

CLM: The Visual Maps

Visual maps are an integral part of CLM. They help you consolidate the most important information (key concepts) from numerous class-related materials into one place and reflect your understanding of the information in the class materials. You’ll no longer need to sort through various notebooks, textbooks, handouts, and loose pieces of paper to find that lost piece of information.

More importantly, visual maps take advantage of the hierarchical levels of information both in your brain and within course material texts. This allows you to form an initial outline of the main ideas of the subject you’re learning, followed by a subsequent addition of key concepts and supporting details to further structure the information as you advance through the 5Ps.

With CLM, you don’t have to “get it all” at once. Rather, you’re gradually learning the material through an iterative and constructive process, which is also helping you identify what’s important, why it’s important, and what else is missing.

Visual maps are so powerful and work so well because they are based on memory principles that help you learn and retain new information. They are effective because they:

Force you to be active, focus, concentrate, and think.

Contain visual cues that strengthen memory.

Provide connections and structure to organize information logically and meaningfully.

Provide a way to personalize information according to your interests and what makes sense to you.

As you’ll see in Chapter 2, drawing visual maps is very easy and even fun. In fact, you don’t even have to draw; the computer does the drawing. There are many free programs you can download and start using immediately. Visual maps can be used in a variety of settings and by everyone from children in kindergarten to college students to business professionals. Don’t worry; everyone has visual thinking ability, including you. The problem is that most of us have never been encouraged to develop our intrinsic ability to think visually.

CLM: The 5Ps Process

The 5 phases of CLM are:

Preview (preview the lecture material): Before class starts, preview the lecture material (textbook, lecture notes, etc.) to become familiar with the lecture topic and unfamiliar terms and concepts. This phase results in a high-level visual map (outline) that serves as the initial framework to organize and connect key concepts and make them relevant to your mind. The preview phase also prepares your mind for the information to be discussed in the lecture, resulting in increased interest, participation, and comprehension during the lecture.

Participate (participate actively in lectures): Active engagement in the lecture results in a revised key concepts framework (visual map) and further solidifies meaningful learning.

Process (process all lecture-related information into your visual map): Process the information from lecture, textbook, and other resources immediately or shortly after the lecture by organizing and connecting key concepts into a further refined and more detailed visual map. In this phase, you’re essentially processing all information in a very personal way so that it is meaningful to you. This helps transfer information from short-term memory to long-term memory.

Practice (practice by solving new problems): Don’t simply read through practice examples where the solution has been worked out for you. Also, don’t stick with repetitive practice examples. The key here is to apply what you’ve learned to situations you haven’t encountered before. Use your existing knowledge to tackle new problems of all sorts – concrete, abstract, factual, conceptual, and procedural. Approach practicing problems as though you were taking an exam by working examples you’ve never seen before. This phase gives you “handson” experience, helps you review, and further solidifies what you’ve learned.

Produce (produce results and new ideas): As you critically think about new information, questions, and problems, your fresh perspective will result in a unique product of your understanding, concepts, experiences, ideas, and reasoning. Your mind will, in effect, produce new knowledge that is already well integrated with your existing knowledge.

After every phase and before the start of the next phase, you should be able to mentally recreate, accurately and completely, the entire visual map up to the point where you left off. This serves as a review of what you did, improves your memory and recall, and prepares you for the next phase.

You may place different emphasis on the different phases, but you’ll benefit most when you fully engage in all five phases of CLM.

CLM: The 4 Repeating Steps Within Each P

Within each phase, the 4 following steps encourage active interaction and dialogue between the course materials, your visual map, and your thinking.

Identify key concepts: You decide what’s important and what you want to learn. You are not a passive recipient of information. Rather, you are an active agent in your learning and must determine what information you want to receive in order to learn best. Key concepts could be simple facts and ideas but most commonly represent a set of facts, ideas, attributes, or characteristics.

Meaningfully organize and connect key concepts using a visual map: You decide how you want to learn. You are not a passive recorder of information who simply memorizes key concepts. Rather, you construct your own meaning by organizing and connecting the key concepts in a meaningful framework (visual map). The visual map you compose reveals your understanding and deepens and extends your thinking. Notice that the information has now been accurately captured, reduced to key concepts, connected to other key concepts, and meaningfully organized.

Think critically: By organizing and connecting key concepts, you clear your thoughts and sharpen your understanding so you can think critically about what you’re learning. Critical thinking is a cognitive process that appears in several categories of the cognitive process dimension (see section 1.4) and involves reasoning things out on the basis of evidence and valid conclusions. To think critically means you understand and reconstruct what you hear and read into your own thinking and experience. The end result is a new creation, where someone else’s thinking now exists in your mind within your own framework.

Ask key questions: Critical thinking, in turn, allows you to develop and ask key questions that guide and propel your inquiry and problem solving throughout the 5Ps process. Key questions are questions that investigate information and experience, probe reasons and evidence, and examine interpretations and conclusions.

1.3 CLM: The Benefits

CLM Is Self-Directed

Nobody can teach you better than you can teach yourself because only you know what works best for you. Once you realize that you’re in charge of your learning, you’re liberated, empowered, and engaged. When you no longer blame your teachers and parents for your failures, you have no choice but to take matters into your own hands. With self-control and self-direction, you start to think for yourself and the learning process becomes entirely yours, fed by information from everywhere. Seeing the results you’ve achieved under your own leadership is both rewarding and motivating.

CLM Is Engaging and Fun

Now that you realize that you’re the driver in your learning process, you must figure out how you want to drive. If there’s one characteristic that separates the leaders from the followers and the successful from the unsuccessful, it is curiosity. It’s curiosity that made Albert Einstein the creative genius we all admire. It’s the curious thinker who will ask the right questions and find new solutions. If you’re not curious, then you’re not asking yourself questions. If you’re not asking yourself questions, then you’re satisfied with just getting by. If you want to be an outstanding learner, you must develop a curious mind. Curiosity and problem solving are an integral part of CLM, because CLM requires you to constantly ask new questions in an attempt to get the missing details (concepts) and connections needed to grasp the big picture. By becoming engaged, rather than simply reading and listening, you’re actively learning.

CLM Is Sustainable

A very important quality of any learning method is that it be sustainable. The method must be simple enough and effective enough to be used throughout your college education and even after college. A simple study method such as cramming is not sustainable because you’re just memorizing information for an exam and that information will “disappear” within a few days. A complicated and cumbersome method will be abandoned a week into the semester. That’s why CLM was trimmed to include only the essential elements — the 5Ps and 4 steps — that add real value to your learning and your grades. With CLM, you’re assured of a consistent approach and sustainable results.

CLM Is Dynamic and Customizable

We’re living in an age where the known and established constantly gets replaced by the new. Pen-and-paper note taking in this environment is too slow and outdated.

For a learning method to be worth anything, it must be dynamic and able to accommodate changes in information and changes in your thinking. The flexibility inherent in CLM makes changes possible within seconds, without getting in the way of your thinking. CLM’s dynamic framework can easily accommodate individual preferences and encourages fine-tuning to make it personal and meaningful.

CLM Leads to Efficient and Effective Learning

Let’s start first with the obvious benefit of CLM: efficiency. It’s not the effort you put in that you get graded on; rather, it’s what you know and your ability to apply and communicate what you know. Therefore, an effective learning method should deliver the same or better results but cut down on the effort and time required to deliver those results. Two independent studies showed that utilizing visual mapping software can help you increase your productivity by up to 20 percent, the equivalent of gaining back an extra day to invest in other college activities.4 With CLM, you only do things once (never repeating a task) because everything you do in CLM has a learning purpose. Furthermore, with CLM you don’t have to read or write everything; rather, you’re only distilling and integrating important concepts. This, in turn, saves you lots of time and effort, while still delivering outstanding learning results.

With CLM, not only are you doing things right, saving you time and effort, but you’re also doing the right thing: effectively learning. Simple memorization might work in high school for some subjects, but it will hardly ever work in college. Meaningful learning is required to do well on college exams. Your old study methods, including memorization, won’t help you with the testing tasks commonly employed by college instructors:

Summarize in your own words.

Explain relationships to other concepts.

Give new examples.

Solve new problems.

With CLM, those testing tasks are not a problem, because you’ll be doing those exact tasks and more during your learning process.

As a result of CLM:

You’re benefiting from a consistent method that takes the guesswork out of learning, reduces wasted time spent passively studying, and eliminates the need for cramming.

You can evaluate your performance and, based on that evaluation, refine your learning process. With CLM, you can measure and improve your inputs (time and effort), not just your results (learning and grades). You should aim to achieve maximum results from your input.

You’re fully engaged in a very personal and relevant learning process.

Your conceptual framework (visual map) constantly grows in scope and depth with the addition of new key concepts and the resulting shift in their organization and connections.

Your thinking thrives as the result of more relevant content and improved organization and connections.

Your key questions prepare and engage you for the next phase of learning.

You’re meaningfully learning through the use of an active, cognitive, and constructive process.

As you can see, CLM is easy and can be applied immediately. CLM is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.

1.4 Does CLM Work?

YES! Here’s the evidence from my personal experience.

CLM evolved over many years. I started with the basic framework of this method during my MBA studies at Zicklin School of Business from 2001–2003. Having a chemistry background, rather than the business background of my classmates, I had to find a way to synthesize and learn vast amounts of graduate material while still learning the background material on which these graduate courses were based. The tool that proved tremendously valuable was visual mapping, which I still use today in everything that I do (including writing this book).

For me, visual mapping was an amazing improvement over plain text and linear thinking; it vastly improved my ability to learn, think, and communicate important concepts and ideas. Suddenly, I was able to visualize multiple connections and pathways. Once you try it, you’ll recognize the amazing power visual maps have to facilitate and enhance understanding and learning.

While attending the business school, I also taught chemistry as an adjunct professor at a local community college in New York, where I took the visual mapping tool and applied it to my chemistry classes. It worked wonderfully, but it wasn’t enough in itself to provide a complete learning method for students. That’s when I developed an early version of the 5Ps learning process and eventually merged it with visual mapping to create the CLM.

I spent subsequent years putting CLM into practice and fine-tuning the method. I kept what worked and improved upon or discarded what didn’t. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. I had plenty of help from my students and their friends who tested CLM in real-life learning situations. Although CLM started intuitively, it’s been thoroughly validated over the years by the harshest critics — students themselves. These days, students everywhere are using CLM with much success.

YES! Here’s the evidence from cognitive psychology.

The remainder of this section discusses three aspects of cognitive psychology that support CLM. Skip to Section 1.5 if you’re not interested in the cognitive psychology of learning.

After I started fine-tuning CLM, I decided to research connections between CLM and cognitive psychology to discover why CLM worked so well. Connections quickly became obvious.

Information Processing Model5 (IPM)

In cognitive psychology, psychologists frequently use IPM to explain how we receive, process, and learn information. According to IPM, memory is divided into three storage systems (see diagram below):

Sensory memory: Retains a copy of what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. It has unlimited capacity and lasts between a fraction of a second and a few seconds.

Short-term memory: Has capacity to store seven or fewer items or sounds or images and functions as temporary storage before discarding or transferring to long-term memory. It lasts for 15–20 seconds and up to 20 minutes if the information is repeated. Chunking (i.e., grouping of information), repetition, and organization of information have been shown to significantly enhance the short-term memory transfer to long-term memory.

Long-term memory: Compared to other memories, this is relatively permanent storage. Transfer of new information from short-term memory to long-term memory involves organization and consolidation of information. Long-term memory provides a framework to which we attach new knowledge.

Information in long-term memory is stored in interrelated networks, which, in turn, form intricate knowledge structures linked to other knowledge structures. When an existing knowledge structure is activated by new information, other linked knowledge structures are also activated.

Important take-away points (note that all of the following play critical roles in CLM):

Because of the linkage between knowledge structures within long-term memory, new information, in order to be remembered, must be encountered in a way that triggers the existing knowledge structures. Asking key questions provides just this sort of trigger.

Short-term memory can be easily overloaded; learning in phases helps overcome this by allowing the brain to retain more detail with each phase, thereby strengthening the transfer between short-term memory and long-term memory.

Chunking, organization, and repetition of information are essential to maximize transfer from short-term memory to long-term memory.

Information is stored in long-term memory based on relevance and meaning. Hence, meaningfully connecting key concepts maximizes transfer from short-term memory to long-term memory.

The Cognitive Process Dimension (Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning)6

Many students falsely believe that memorizing information is equivalent to learning. Cognitive psychologists, however, tell us there is a significant distinction between memorization and meaningful learning. The cognitive process dimension, which is based on educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning, is one well-recognized way to present the different levels of learning. The following diagram lists the six cognitive dimension categories and the cognitive processes within the categories (from lowest cognitive complexity to highest).

Important take-away points:

Memorization is not necessarily accompanied by any understanding or the ability to recall information if it is only retained in short-term memory.

In contrast, meaningful learning is tied to existing knowledge. These connections allow the learner to fully integrate the new knowledge and apply it to novel situations.

The following diagram shows how meaningful learning is achieved with CLM and how that learning aligns with the cognitive process dimension.

Psychological Foundations of Visual Maps as a Learning Tool7

Visual maps have their origin in constructivism, a learning theory that posits that learners actively construct knowledge.

In the 1970s, Joseph D. Novak began to study a concept mapping technique. Concept maps are very similar to visual maps. The major difference is that concept maps label the connection between concepts and visual maps don’t. Novak’s work was based on the theories of David Ausubel,8 who argued that learning takes place by the assimilation of new concepts into the existing concept framework held by the learner. In his work, Ausubel made a very important distinction between rote learning (learning that avoids understanding of a subject and instead focuses on memorization) and meaningful learning.

In essence, this learning theory suggests that new information must be meaningfully integrated into existing cognitive structures in order to be truly remembered. That’s exactly what you do with visual maps and why visual mapping was developed. When you learn a new concept, you add it to the appropriate place in the visual map, and in order to do that, you have to analyze the patterns and structures of your topic. This promotes better memorization and recall as well as the ability to apply knowledge in new situations. Experiments have shown that subjects using visual mapping outperform non-visual mappers in longer-term memory retention tests.9

For an even more elaborate and detailed discussion on learning, visit
www.stopstudying.info.

1.5 Will CLM Work for Me?

Absolutely! CLM is for every subject and everybody. The learning method is the same whether you’re learning history in high school, quantum physics in college, or the elements of a new job.

As you’ve seen so far, CLM does not involve speed-reading or gimmicks. It is based on sound principles of learning psychology and has been tested by real students at many colleges and universities.

All you have to do now is:

Learn how to draw visual maps (Chapter 2). If you’re already familiar with visual mapping, you can skip to Chapter 3.

Learn the details of CLM (Chapter 3).

Put CLM into practice as soon as you can.

The few hours you spend learning CLM will lead you to life-long learning productivity. This is not only critical to college, but also to work and life in general.

1.6 Additional Resources

Web Resources

Handpicked Web recommendations are available at
http://www.pearltrees.com/conciselearning.

Books

Handpicked book recommendations are available at
http://conciselearning.com/studyskillsbooks.html.

CHAPTER 2

VISUAL MAPS:
WHAT THEY ARE & HOW
YOU DRAW THEM

2.1 Introduction

This chapter teaches you how to visually map, which is an important tool used in CLM. Skip to Chapter 3 if you’re already familiar with visual mapping.

Universally acknowledged as a very powerful learning tool, visual mapping — diagramming of ideas and concepts — was first developed by Tony Buzan in the 1970s. By using visual maps, you can better and more quickly capture, consolidate, organize, and analyze information and knowledge, and enhance your ability to understand subjects, solve problems, and learn. Once you open your mind to visual mapping, you’ll see that it has endless applications.

Definitions

Visual mapping is known by many other names, most notably Mind Mapping,® but also concept mapping, flow-charting, visual thinking, spider diagramming, memory mapping, semantic mapping, and thought webbing.* Regardless of what you call it, the basic principles are the same.

A visual map is a graphic tool used to collect, create, manage, and exchange information. It represents information via the spatial organization of concepts/topics, ideas, words, or other items linked to and arranged in a radial pattern around a central concept (see diagram).

Think of it as a tree, where the various outlying branches — the subconcepts — all connect back to the trunk or central concept. The elements of a given visual map are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts, with the goal of representing accurate and meaningful connections among them. The concepts are typically represented in a hierarchical fashion with the most general (inclusive) concepts closer to the central concept and the less general (more exclusive or specific) concepts placed further away from the central concept.

For example, if you wanted to compose a visual map representing your life (see diagram), your central concept would be you, and some primary concepts related to your central concept would be personal life, school, work, and extracurricular activities. You can further develop your visual map by adding more branches (subconcepts) to these four primary concepts. As you can see, a visual map adds structure and organization to random thoughts and dispersed content, making the information easier to remember and use.

2.2 Benefits and Uses of Visual Mapping

Visual mapping is essentially an all-encompassing system to capture all your information. It’s a matter of taking information that you have and with which you are presented and then organizing it in a more useful and meaningful way. Skip to Section 2.3 if you’re already familiar with benefits and uses of visual mapping.

Benefits of Visual Mapping10

In our information-based society, the ability to handle large amounts of complex information is extremely important. Visual mapping helps represent available information visually in a comprehensive and clear manner. Properly organizing information allows you to easily understand and evaluate existing knowledge and opens the door for effective application of your knowledge.

The following are some of the major benefits of visual mapping.

Use your brain’s full range of skills: A visual map is a way of representing relations between ideas, images, or words. Because they’re visual as well as verbal, incorporating images as well as words, visual maps play a key role in harnessing the full range of our brain skills in a single, uniquely powerful framework.

Overcome information overload: Visual maps require much less time to compose than traditional longhand or even word processed notes and also take less time to read. Furthermore, visual maps place emphasis on key concepts and clarify their organization and associations. As a result, you can process a lot more information better and faster.

One-place repository of information and resources: Not only can you integrate key concepts, but you can also link images, data, charts, and files in any format (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) so that you have all pertinent information in one place.

High-level (bird’s eye) and low-level (detailed) view: Visual maps can expand or collapse to give you a focused view or a bird’s eye view. By showing everything — the trees and the forest — in a single view, visual maps help clarify thoughts and tackle complex problems. The accuracy and depth afforded by visual maps are hard to match with any other tool.

Free-form thinking: Visual maps help you break the habit of thinking linearly and encourage flexibility. This means making use of more visual thinking to link concepts in relationship webs rather than in sequential order. Visual maps are free-style and encourage you to constantly update and refine your thinking and learning.

Increased creativity: Visual maps’ flexible structure encourages new ways of thinking about concepts and ideas and allows for the uniquely personal organization of information.

Holistic integration of information and knowledge: Visual representation allows for development of a holistic understanding that words alone cannot convey. Visual maps are a way to develop logical thinking by revealing connections and helping students see how individual ideas form a larger whole. Visual maps are great for integrating vast amounts of information from multiple sources. Visual maps show you where you are in your learning and, just as important, where you are going.

Clear thinking through connections and organization: Visual mapping allows students to understand the relationships between ideas by creating an image map of the connections. These maps enable students to see the connections between ideas they already have, connect new ideas to existing knowledge, and organize ideas in a logical structure that allows for future modification. This is the basis for meaningful learning.

Problem solving, decision making, and action taking: Visual mapping can also enhance the problem-solving and decision-making process by generating alternative solutions and options, revealing a previously unseen but appropriate action.

Improved memory and understanding: Visual maps are very effective at bringing together the logical left brain and the visual and creative right brain to improve memory and productivity. The real power behind visual maps is the ability to link and layer information. By establishing links and layers between concepts, you can see the big picture and gain a deeper understanding of a topic.

Attractive, interactive, and fun: Visual maps are enjoyable to develop, review, and remember. Because visual maps are attractive and interactive, they maintain interest for much longer than traditional narrative text.

Visual Mapping as a Learning Tool

Many other learning tools can be distracting and confusing. Visual mapping is the ultimate tool to help organize and relate complex information, streamline thought processes, and improve learning in a visual and personalized way.

Visual mapping has become an essential tool for students who want to accelerate and improve their learning and understanding. Given the vast amounts of information they are expected to master, such acceleration and improvement is critical to students’ academic success. Through mapping concepts and ideas, students become better learners and thinkers. Visual mapping offers enough flexibility to maintain interest and encourage curiosity and enough structure to keep the learner on track. When mapping, one is constantly thinking, organizing, connecting, analyzing, simplifying, synthesizing, questioning, and, ultimately, learning.

Visual Mapping as a Learning Assessment Tool

Visual maps can also be used as an assessment tool to check your understanding of a particular subject. Novak’s research showed that visual mapping can help learners detect misunderstandings as well as understandings of the represented information. Visual maps express students’ misconceptions just as clearly as their correct conceptions and can therefore help students and instructors diagnose and remedy these misconceptions.11

My Experience Using Visual Mapping in College Courses

As a teacher, I believe the real key to learning is summarizing new information and tying new information to existing knowledge. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a visual map, which combines pictures and words, is worth several thousand words.

The visual mapping technique is deeply rooted in learning theory, particularly the insight that new learning needs to fit into existing familiar models. Mapping is a useful strategy for expressing your current understanding of a topic and for noting your developing understanding.

Students’ Experience Using Visual Mapping in College Courses

Once students become familiar with visual mapping, they can use it to prevent the information overload that frequently plagues them. Students praise visual maps as the best tool for note taking and summarizing large amounts of information into a format that helps them study, learn better, and excel on exams. Without the opportunity for taking an active role in the learning process that visual maps provide, students find learning mundane, are uninspired, learn less effectively, and more easily forget what they do learn.

Even in complex courses such as chemistry, students credit visual mapping with enabling them to understand the material and do well on exams. In fact, the students with the highest marks in my classes were typically those who used visual maps.

Other Uses of Visual Mapping

Visual maps’ uses are not limited to learning; professionals and others also use them to enhance their productivity at work and in life. There isn’t any task to which visual mapping can’t add value by offering unique integration and insight.

The uses for visual mapping are nearly infinite, but the following graphic lists (in alphabetical order) some examples of tasks to which visual mapping is often applied.

This is not an exhaustive list, and most visual mapping programs have so much functionality that those of us who specialize in them are still trying to apply them all.

I hope the discussion thus far has convinced you that visual mapping taps into more of your brain’s capabilities, helping you to learn more and to be more productive, resourceful, and creative.

2.3 How to Draw Visual Maps

Visual maps seek to capture and consolidate all information on a particular subject in one place. Visual mapping represents what you know about a given topic. Creating a visual map is a great way for you to identify and relate key concepts from lectures and readings. As you compose a visual map, you’ll come to realize that visual mapping is very intuitive.

Here you’ll find a breakdown of the basic steps to visual mapping. With each step, I’ll expand upon my own example. I’ve chosen to use a “personal dashboard” — a one-page or one-screen summary of someone’s personal life. My subject is Linda (modeled after my wife at a time when we first met), an excellent student at the fictional Visual Mapping University.

As you read through the steps, you should attempt to compose a visual map as well (a worksheet with mind mapping steps is available in Appendix 1). If nothing else comes to mind, you could draw your own personal dashboard. Try this freehand on a blank sheet of paper or with a visual mapping program if you have one (visual mapping programs will be discussed in section 2.4). The more of these visual maps you complete, the better and faster you’ll become at creating them. Even with something as intuitive as visual mapping, practice improves performance.

Step 1: Select the concept, topic, or subject to map.

What is the concept, topic, or subject that you want to map?

In my example, we’ll be mapping Linda’s personal dashboard to help her understand and organize her life. Select your concept or topic as well.

Step 2: Gather all the relevant information.

Do you have all the information you need at hand? If not, get it.

In my example, I have gathered all the relevant information about Linda.

Step 3: Keep the map simple, concise, relevant, accurate, complete, logical, and clear.

Simplicity is the driving force of all visual maps. Don’t include everything. Map only the key ideas and avoid writing sentences.

Step 4: Start in the center with the central concept.

When starting to construct a visual map, it is important to define one central, most inclusive concept. This central concept is equivalent to a title or a main heading. More specific concepts will then be arranged in hierarchical fashion subordinate to the key concept.

What is the central concept, topic, idea, word, question, or problem around which you will build your map?

In my example, the main concept is Linda’s personal dashboard.

Step 5: Add primary concepts on the branches connected to the central concept.

Primary concepts and other subconcepts radiate out from the map’s central concept. Primary concepts are the key concepts that produce the greatest number of associations to the central concept. They are equivalent to chapter headings and should fully describe your map’s topic at a high level. Creating effective basic ordering entries is a critical first step when creating a mind map because they serve as idea catalysts and shape the content and meaning of the rest of the map.

When you create a visual map, remember that you are building an “emergent structure.” As you transfer ideas from your brain to paper (computer screen if you’re using a computer program), keep in mind that they don’t need to be perfectly arranged or styled at first. Organization and presentation can come later. In fact, I highly recommend that you initially simply “dump” all the information and worry about organization and presentation later. Think of what you are doing as similar to building a house: you lay the foundation before you put in the framing, windows, flooring, and so on.

Here are some ordering ideas for your primary concepts and subconcepts:

Ws: who/what, how much, where, when, how, and why.

Classification: Arrangements or relationships.

Definitions: Meanings of things.

Divisions: Chapters or lessons or themes.

Evaluation: Benefits.

Function: What things do.

History: Chronological sequence of events.

Process: How things work.

Properties: Characteristics.

Roles: Roles or relationships of characters.

Structure: How things are formed.

When you’re not exactly sure where to place an idea in the hierarchy of concepts, you can temporarily “park” it in an open area of the map as a floating concept. Floating concepts are not attached to any other topics and can be freely positioned anywhere on the map. Floating concepts are a great way to quickly record a series of ideas in a visual map, such as when brainstorming or taking meeting notes, without having to slow down to think about where an idea belongs.

Let’s apply what we just learned. What are the concepts that can be associated with the central concept?

In my example, the three primary concepts are personal life, school, and work. I also have the floating extracurricular activities concept. I’ve left it floating because I’m not sure whether to make it a primary concept or place it within one of the existing primary concepts as a subconcept.

To draw the visual map, place the central concept at the center of the visual map, with primary concepts branching off the central concept.

Step 6: Branch subconcepts off the primary concepts to elaborate and clarify.

At this point, add additional concepts that help explain or expand the primary concepts. Use a top down approach, working from general to specific or use a free association approach by brainstorming ideas and then developing links.

In my example, I decided to make extracurricular activities a primary concept, rather than adding it as a secondary concept to work, school, or personal life.

Continue creating the visual map and associating additional concepts. How is your visual map coming along?

Step 7: Continue to capture and map key concepts, reorganize, and edit, as needed.

You will almost always get new ideas as you start mapping. It’s natural and to be expected, so just incorporate everything important that comes to mind, even if it means that you must reposition other terms and change links. This flexibility and dynamic nature is what makes visual maps so useful.

Do you need to make any additions and changes to your visual map?

Step 8: Add more information — provided it adds value — to the key concepts you’ve already mapped.

Once you have the visual map skeleton, you can start adding additional relevant information.

Visual mapping computer programs allow you to add a number of features, like those listed here, to your visual maps.

The following is my revised visual map. Note the new additions and rearrangement:

Notes to the three primary concepts.

Extracurricular activities and work were rearranged.

E-mails for all contacts.

Web site hyperlinks to web resources.

Attachments to the three school subjects.

Accounting of hours spent in school.

Relationship arrow from tutoring to school (to account for total hours spent in school).

Completion percentage of house chores.

Callout to clarify that the internship is only for the summer.

Dates for volunteering, internship, music performance, and basketball tournament.

How is your visual map coming along?

Step 9: Add visual elements and formatting to increase the map’s effectiveness.

Although visual maps are about productivity, not looks, additional visuals and formatting can call attention to specific concepts and add visual interest.

Colors: Your brain thrives on color and imagery, so take the time to add color to the concepts, lines, and text of your visual map.

Icons: Icons add meaning and context to visual maps, making it easier to visually classify a map’s contents. If you use them in your maps, be sure to create a legend to explain what they mean. Visual mapping programs usually have a library of icons available for use.

Images: This is another way to add visual appeal to your maps. Images help enhance the meaning and context of your map and help others to interpret the map’s contents. Don’t add random images for decoration. Most visual mapping software programs include extensive image libraries.

Here is my revised visual map in grayscale. Different colors and images were added to the central concept and four primary concepts.

Step 10: Go through the visual map checklist for any final edits.

After the preliminary visual map is constructed, it should be revised as many times as needed to remain up-to-date and meaningful.

The final visual map should adhere to the following guidelines:

Map is well organized and clear.

Content is factually accurate and complete.

Concepts are logically arranged and follow a natural progression.

Concepts are succinctly presented with minimal text.

Visual map shows what you have learned about the topic and what you want presented.

Links show correct and meaningful relationships between each connected concept.

Labels accurately describe the relationship between concepts.

Text is clear and easy to read.

Color is effectively used for emphasis and increased comprehension.

Graphics are used only when necessary to increase comprehension.

If someone other than you will be using the map, it makes sense to the intended audience.

Spelling and grammar are correct throughout the map.

Summary of Steps for Drawing Visual Maps

Although I’ve broken down the process of drawing visual maps into 10 distinct steps, you’ll soon realize that only two steps are truly critical: (1) that you identify/add key concepts and (2) that you organize/connect key concepts correctly and meaningfully.

In other words, provided you do these two things, you don’t need to worry too much about the mapping process. Visual maps come in many variations and you may encounter other visual mapping guides that describe a different organization order or number of steps. The visual maps that you make are yours alone, and you have the flexibility to choose the form that best suits your purpose and needs.

2.4 Visual Mapping Computer Programs

Advantages of Electronic Mapping over Paper Mapping

Hand-drawn visual maps are the most practical when you don’t have access to a computer, for example, when you’re attending a meeting. However, visual mapping has come a long way since the days when getting out a piece of paper and a pencil was your only option. These days, visual mapping programs are sophisticated, flexible, and available for almost any electronic platform. They offer features that hand-drawn maps can’t replicate. The following visual map details (in alphabetical order) some of the major advantages to using electronic mapping programs.

As you can see, software programs extend the concept of visual mapping by allowing individuals to map not only thoughts and ideas but also information on their computers and the Internet. Of course, hand-drawn visual maps are still very useful when a very personal visual map is needed or when software is not available.

Visual Mapping Programs

Both free and proprietary visual mapping programs are available. A comprehensive directory of programs and additional resources, including visual map galleries, is available at http://conciselearning.com/mindmapping.html.

The most popular free visual mapping programs are XMind, FreeMind, Mind42, and IHMC CmapTools. They offer robust feature menus, are easy to use, and are compatible with other mapping programs.

The most popular propriety programs are MindManager, iMindMap, MindMeister, ConceptDraw, DropMind, NovaMind, CoMapping, TopicScape, and Inspiration. Note that most propriety programs have a free 30-day trial period.

For mobile devices, such as iPhone and iPad, the most popular apps are iThougths, Mindjet, Inspiration, iMindMap, and MindMeister.

I wish you productive and fun visualizing!

2.5 Additional Resources

Web Resources

Handpicked Web recommendations are available at
http://www.conciselearning.com/visualmapping. and
http://conciselearning.com/mindmapping.html.

Books

Handpicked book recommendations are available at
http://conciselearning.com/studyskillsbooks.html

*Although visual mapping is used synonymously with mind mapping in this text, visual mapping includes but is not limited to mind mapping. For more information, visit http://conciselearning.com/visualmapping.html.

CHAPTER 3

CONCISE LEARNING
METHOD (CLM)

3.1 What’s Your Learning Strategy?

If you’re like most students, you’re probably overwhelmed with information and, as a result, feel confused, unsure where to begin, and out of control. Simply hoping for the best by reading the material over and over again isn’t an effective strategy.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In this chapter, I’ll show you how to regain control with CLM, the proven method that will make you a better learner and enable you to achieve better grades. It’s based on the premise that learning is a multi-phase process, in which you meaningfully organize and connect key concepts through visual maps, critically think, and ask key questions.

3.2 CLM: The Strategy

In the last few years, educational theory has been dominated by concepts such as “multiple intelligences” and “learning styles,” which I categorize as “learning components.” They all play a role in learning, some more than others, depending on the student.

CLM is based on a holistic learning strategy and combines the most important learning components into one method. The great thing about CLM is that you can easily integrate whatever learning components work best for you into the way you use CLM. Here’s the summary of CLM. You may remember it, along with the general overview of CLM, from section 1.2.

3.3 CLM: The 4 Repeating Steps Within Each Phase

Before you go through the 5Ps of CLM, it’s important that you understand the 4 repeating steps within each phase of the 5Ps.

The 4 steps within each phase of the CLM form a continuous cycle during which you identify key concepts in the raw and unstructured information presented to you. You then organize the information, which in turn improves your understanding and gives you the ability to think critically about the information you have and the information that you need (key questions) to complete your understanding of the material.

Using the 4 steps provides the following benefits:

Processing of unstructured information into a meaningful knowledge framework (visual map) through an active process of questioning and systematic method of reasoning.

Clear thinking, removing vague or incorrect understanding and guiding further inquiry.

Generation of interest and engagement.

Consistency in the learning process.

Rapid yet thorough and effective learning.

Better learning and better grades.

Here’s a more detailed look at the 4 steps:

1. Identify key concepts: Capture new, important concepts from information resources (textbook, class lecture, etc.) into one integrated visual map (see Chapter 2 to review how to make a visual map). Identifying, writing down, organizing, and connecting key concepts is a great exercise in learning. By writing down your thoughts, you’re making the concepts tangible and memorable. By recording them in both words and spatially-related representations, you’re engaging both the logical and creative sides of your brain, maximizing information retention and personal relevance.

Here are some questions that you should be asking in this step:

What’s the big picture?

What details are new and important?

What are the main ideas, terms, and concepts?

2. Meaningfully organize and connect key concepts using a visual map: Organize and integrate concepts in a meaningful way by making connections between the concepts in the visual map. In essence, you’re constantly adding, relating, and building upon what you already know. This often requires that you make sense of unorganized information and cope with ambiguity.

Here are some questions that you should be asking in this step:

What’s the big picture (never lose sight of the big picture)?

How are the concepts related?

How can I best organize the key concepts (e.g., by time, location, people, category, continuum, alphabetical order, cause and effect, topic, etc.)?

3. Think critically: Having organized and connected key concepts, you can now think clearly and critically. Critical thinking is a continuous, purposeful, and reflective process about what to believe, do, think, or learn. It is fact-based, hypothesis-driven, and structured thinking. It uses systematic and objective methods to solve problems and liberates you from inaccuracies, biases, and misleading information. With critical thinking, you’ll very often discover new learning experiences, which will give you new frames of reference and will shake your entrenched way of doing things and your old assumptions. With critical thinking, you’ll have many “wow” moments.

Here are some important questions12 that you should be asking in this step:

Ws: Who/what, how much, where, when, how, why, what if, and what else?

Purpose: Why are you reading this? Why does it matter? What is your desired outcome? What do you want to be able to do with this?

Clarity: Do you understand the concepts? Could you express the concept in another way? Could you give an example? How should you interpret it?

Accuracy: Is the information true? How do you know that it’s true? Are you being a healthy skeptic? Have you captured it accurately? Do you need to refine any of your previous information based on these new facts?

Precision: What are the details? Do you need additional specifics? Could you be more exact? Are you getting stuck in the details?

Relevance: How is this connected to other information? What does this mean? Why is this important? Are you being diverted away from the main point? Are you letting your personal biases lead you astray? How can you apply it to other information?

Depth: What’s the big picture and what else is missing? What are the different layers of complexity? Are you addressing all the complexities? Are you dealing systematically with parts of the whole?

Breadth: Do you need to consider another point of view? Is there another way to look at this? Are you being open minded? Are you considering the whole?

Logic: Does this make sense? Does it follow from what you already know or what you read? What are the assumptions? Does the evidence enable you to draw conclusions?

Significance: Which of the concepts are most important? Are you focusing on key concepts?

Fairness: Is the information biased? Are you looking from various viewpoints?

Patterns: Are there any patterns (similarities, differences, dependence, independence, etc.)?

Orderliness: Is there a better arrangement of details that could result in better understanding?

Critical thinking is an integral part of CLM and deserves more attention than I was able to provide here. Two good resources for developing your critical thinking are my book recommendations on critical thinking available at http://conciselearning.com/studyskillsbooks.html and videos by critical thinking experts available at www.youtube.com/conciselearning.

4. Ask key questions: Identify remaining questions to drive your inquiry, keep you focused, identify the purpose behind what you do, and channel your learning. Don’t ask questions to which you already know the answers. Asking questions will enable you to discover missing concepts and connections, while keeping you interested and engaged in your learning process. If you maintain a curious mind, you won’t have any problems with this step.

Here are some questions that you should be asking in this step:

What’s still missing or not making sense?

Depending on the status of your visual map, both open-ended (how, why, what if) and close-ended questions (who/what, how much, where, when) may be required.

By asking key questions, you’re helping yourself find solutions and building confidence and skill in regards to the process of asking questions and developing answers. The more you learn, the more questions you’ll find, and the more comfortable you’ll become with the “question culture.” With these 4 steps, you put discovery back into your learning. You’ll be solving problems, answering questions, and working out solutions yourself, taking the knowledge presented to you by someone or something else and making it your knowledge. Engagement and learning go hand in hand.

When you complete the 4 steps in one phase, move to the next phase and repeat the 4 steps. Note that you’ll have to go through the 4 steps few times before you complete a phase. Add new key concepts and revise concepts and organization as content evolves to reflect your new understanding and give you a more comprehensive visual map.

At the end of every session and before the next P, you must quiz yourself to see if you could mentally recreate the visual map without mistakes — both the big picture and the details.

3.4 CLM: The 5Ps Process

The 5Ps are part of a systematic and continuous process for managing your time and energy to generate outstanding learning and grades.

The 5Ps process benefits you in the following ways:

Systematic process doesn’t let you fall behind on the material.

Material becomes manageable.

Rapid yet thorough and effective learning.

Better learning and better grades.

The 5Ps process is described here in detail so that you can better understand how it works. Here is the summary diagram of the 5Ps that you’ve already seen.

With each P, we’ll discuss inputs (what’s going in), phase process (what you need to do), and outputs (what you will get out of it).

PREVIEW (Phase 1): Preview the Lecture Material

The preview step should be performed within an hour before a lecture or in the morning of the lecture day if class schedule doesn’t allow for preview before lecture. It should take less than 15 minutes. With this step, you’re setting up a framework that will help you make sense of and remember the lecture material.

INPUTS

Sources of information:

Existing knowledge on the topic.

Textbook.

Lecture materials (lecture handouts, lecture presentations, etc.).

THE 4 REPEATING STEPS

Identify key concepts:

Survey (skim and scan) the textbook and lecture materials.

Get the big picture from the textbook chapter’s title, headings, subheadings, introduction, and summary. This high-level surveying helps trigger concepts in your long-term memory and move them to your working memory. As we discussed in Chapter 1, connecting new information to existing knowledge will facilitate integration and consolidation of old and new information, allowing you to learn better and faster.

If information is brand new, your brain will begin creating a new framework for this information.

In this phase, you begin developing the visual map skeleton and roadmap for the other phases.

Next, add key concepts (bolded terms, italicized terms, formulas) and summarize key visuals (pictures, diagrams, tables, charts, graphs, etc.) by skimming the text book chapter. Don’t read the entire chapter because it will be discussed in the lecture and you’ll forget the irrelevant details anyway. For key concepts, you can add definitions in the notes section of your visual map (don’t clutter the visual map) and you can also reference important visuals in the notes section (again, avoid clutter). As you’re adding the key concepts, ask yourself why they’re important.

Do the same (big picture, key concepts, and key visuals) for lecture materials, if there are any.

Add what you think you already know about this topic and what you have studied in the past (what comes to mind with this topic)?

How does the new material integrate with your existing information?

Skip the remaining material. You won’t remember it at this state anyway and you’ll come back to it in the process phase.

Organize and connect key concepts in your visual map in a meaningful way:

Begin organizing and connecting the concepts. Look at the best way to lump the information.

How can you meaningfully integrate this information so you understand the big picture and key details?

Think critically:

Be fully aware and inquisitive (review step 3 in Section 3.3).

Ask key questions:

Finding questions at this point won’t be difficult. It’s normal to be confused at this stage, which means you’ve done a good job informing yourself.

Skim over questions from the lecture material (within the chapter, end of chapter, teacher’s questions, etc.).

You should also have plenty of your own questions that have arisen as you’ve organized the visual map. What is still not clear or is confusing to you?

Prioritize your questions (which questions are most important) and anticipate answers.

Note that there’s nothing wrong with answering some of your questions by searching online or looking at other books, if you think that you’ll be able to ask better questions once you have the answers to your first ones.

OUTPUTS

Skeleton visual map:

As always, a little planning goes a long way. With the visual map skeleton that you’ve created, you can let your mind flow and be curious before and during the lecture.

Key questions for the next phase:

What do you think about the concepts you currently have in your visual map? What do they make you wonder?

What else do you need to know to increase your understanding of the topic?

These questions will drive your active participation in the next phase, where you’ll get the answers to your burning questions (if not, you’ll find them in the process phase).

Prepared for the participation phase:

You’ve acquired a general idea about the topic. You’ve also gained valuable insight and focus that you can take to the lecture.

Your motivation and interest are enhanced. This will help overcome procrastination and will boost your confidence and ability to learn the new material.

By previewing the lecture material, you will have been exposed to key concepts and key questions before walking into the lecture. By familiarizing yourself with key concepts, you will also have become engaged in the topic, begun framing the topic, and activated your brain to learn.

By taking these few minutes up front to preview the material, you won’t be wasting precious lecture time getting oriented, or worse, getting lost altogether.

Learning:

By actively identifying key concepts, organizing and connecting them using a visual map, critically thinking, and asking key questions, you’re efficiently and effectively learning.

Read Case Study

PARTICIPATE (Phase 2): Participate Actively in Lectures

You can’t participate in lectures if you haven’t previewed the material before the lecture. You also can’t participate in lectures if you don’t attend classes. Always attend lectures. If you miss a lecture, get your classmate’s notes on the lecture, although they probably won’t be as good as if you had taken them yourself and will take you longer to process.

Even if your teacher gives very detailed lecture notes, you’ll be missing out on the interaction if you skip class. Teachers will often point out in lectures what’s of primary importance and will emphasize relationships that can’t be extracted from lecture notes alone.

Lectures are personal. Regardless of the class size, each student has the power to ask a question at any time and get clarification of a concept. Lectures are your prime opportunity to ask questions as they come up in your learning process, thus making the integration of material more effective.

Students often perceive lectures as a waste of time, when they can actually be a very efficient use of study time. Your teacher has spent a lot of time preparing and organizing the material. Just imagine trying to go through those lecture notes on your own in the mere hour or so that your teacher does it.

INPUTS

Sources of information:

Existing knowledge on the topic, including that from preview phase.

Lecture presentation.

THE 4 REPEATING STEPS

Identify key concepts:

Go to class on time and prepared with your initial visual map.

Pick a good location in class, one where you can see, hear, be heard, and won’t have any distractions.

You can’t possibly write down every word of a lecture, and you shouldn’t try. Instead, you should listen and look for key concepts that you’ll incorporate into your visual map, using as few words as possible. You shouldn’t write sentences, and don’t worry about spelling.

Don’t audio record lectures; hearing the lecture once is enough.

Make references to important diagrams.

Be an active listener. Listen more and write less. Pay attention, don’t space out, and capture ideas, not words.

Be an analytical and critical thinker: evaluate the evidence and conclusions presented.

Assign question marks to concepts and areas that didn’t make sense to you so you can address them in the next phase or ask the teacher about them after class.

Be an active participant by realizing that lectures are a two-way communication, not a solo performance by your teacher. You should ask key questions to help you fill in the gaps in your visual map. Ask for missing information, for an explanation of how this information relates to other pieces, and for clarification of what’s important when a lot of details are presented. You should also ask for examples when needed to help illustrate obscure concepts. For your part, you should share your observations and ideas (i.e., show that you’re listening, that you understand, and that you care about the topic) and relate the lecture material to your life and current events.

Capture important teacher “clues.” These include repetitions and areas of emphasis, opinions, visuals, exceptions, examples, ideas the teacher has taken the time to write down, responses to questions, anything the teacher expended extra time and effort to explain, disagreements with other sources, questions raised but not answered, handouts, buzz words, and the structure used to present the lecture. Because your teacher is the person who will be creating the course tests, it is in your best interest to note and understand what aspects of the material he or she feels are particularly important.

Organize and connect key concepts in your visual map in a meaningful way:

Add new key concepts.

Revise concepts, organization, and connections as necessary.

Think critically:

Be fully aware and inquisitive (review step 3 in Section 3.3).

Ask key questions:

Key questions drive your purpose.

Identify key questions you could ask in class, e-mail your teacher with questions, research on your own, and discuss questions with your classmates.

OUTPUTS

Revised visual map:

In lectures, teachers don’t typically speak in a linear fashion. Rather, they jump around, often identifying links between different concepts. That is where visual mapping’s power becomes especially relevant. Visual mapping allows you to follow this non-linear presentation of information without getting lost or missing out on key concepts. Not only can you capture what teachers say, but you can also organize it in a way that is more coherent and individually tailored. The accuracy and depth of information you can capture this way goes far beyond what you would have achieved with ordinary note taking.

Key questions for the next phase:

What do you think about the concepts you currently have in your visual map? What do they make you wonder?

What else do you need to know to increase your understanding of the topic?

These questions will drive your active participation in the next phase.

Prepared for the process phase:

By actively participating, you’ve just captured and integrated the entire lecture into your previous visual map. Notice how your visual map is now much more elaborate than it was in the preview phase.

Often, this phase will lead to revision of the topic frame established in the previous phase. Not to worry; all these revisions are propelling, solidifying, and improving your learning.

Learning:

By actively identifying key concepts, organizing and connecting them using a visual map, critically thinking, and asking key questions, you’re efficiently and effectively learning.

Read Case Study

PROCESS (Phase 3): Process All Lecture-Related Information Into Your Visual Map

Now that you have all the lecture material in your short-term memory, read the lecture-related resources, especially the textbook, as soon as possible after the lecture while the information is still fresh. A short break is fine if needed (some course material and some teachers are exhausting), but keep in mind that research shows you’ll forget most of what you learned in class within a few hours unless you actively do something with it. By moving immediately into the process phase, you’ll be able to integrate the lecture material with other chapter-related materials, critically think about it, and continue learning. Recognize that all of the information — whether relayed via lecture or in textual materials — is related rather than disparate facts. What you learn should be consistent and should make sense. Throughout the 5Ps process, as you learn more details, start filling in informational gaps, and answer your key questions, you’ll realize that your understanding is not as accurate as you thought it was, necessitating additional edits and revisions to both your visual map and your perceptions of the subject matter.

INPUTS

Sources of information:

Existing knowledge on the topic.

Be careful how you choose your resources. During the first week of classes, you can ask for your teacher’s help and approval on outside resources you want to use. You should also periodically reevaluate your resources for their usability and question whether you’re missing out on any other useful resources. In general, the most important resources are the lecture handouts, textbook, tutoring notes, and laboratory work. Less important — and often far less reliable and relevant — are notes from the Internet.

THE 4 REPEATING STEPS

Identify key concepts:

Now is the time to read the textbook to fill in missing information, followed by any other important resources that you’ve identified.

The text book is a guide to reinforce class discussion, give additional details, and clear up any confusion. You don’t have the time to read everything. Target what you’re reading.

Focus while reading. Read carefully and with intention. Be an active reader so your mind doesn’t wander. Skim non-essential text, placing your focus on the key concepts required to get the complete picture and flesh out your understanding.

Don’t transfer key concepts from text book to your visual map after each sentence. Rather, break the book into logical sections, read through the entire section, make sense of what you read, and only then extract and transfer key concepts from the text book to your visual map.

There’s no need to highlight, underline, or make any other markings in the textbook. After you read and process your textbook, you won’t be going back to it any more. That’s why you have the visual map.

Read with a purpose (know why you’re reading). As you’re reading, try to answer the key questions that you had from the preview and participation phases.

Remember the Ws: who/what, how much, where, when, how, and why. For additional ideas, add in “what else” and “what if.”

Be critical of the concepts you’re incorporating. Ask yourself whether they make sense, whether they offer the best fit with your existing knowledge, and whether you understand them.

Research online anything that you haven’t been able to glean from your existing resources. Use reliable sources and be careful not to over-search. Spending all your time on the Internet will defeat the purpose of CLM.

All question marks from the lecture should be resolved by the time you complete this step.

Use the notes section of the visual map to record any subtle distinctions, references, and definitions. You don’t want to clutter the visual map.

Maintain an efficient pace. Keep an eye on how you’re using your time. Students typically spend about two hours processing information for every one hour of lecture time.

Organize and connect key concepts in your visual map in a meaningful way:

Add new key concepts. However, don’t simply accumulate notes. You should be constantly combining, consolidating, simplifying, revising, and organizing your visual map.

Think critically:

Be fully aware and inquisitive (review step 3 in Section 3.3).

Ask key questions:

Revisit the end-of-chapter questions to get a sense of what questions you’ve already answered and what questions remain unanswered.

Identifying remaining questions and attempting to answer them is critical at this point so that your understanding of the subject matter is as complete as possible before moving on to the practice phase.

OUTPUTS

Revised visual map:

Be careful about sticking to a framework that is not supported by the facts. Your visual map should be an accurate representation of the concepts.

Key questions for the next phase:

What else do you need to know to increase your understanding of the topic?

Can you apply what you have learned thus far?

These questions will drive your active participation in the next phase.

Prepared for the practice phase:

You’ve now acquired and integrated additional concepts, revised the concepts and the framework as necessary, and, in turn, deepened your understanding and strengthened your memory.

Simply creating visual maps is not enough; you must be able to recreate them. By the end of this phase, you should be able to recall and explain the entire visual map that you’ve constructed. Be honest when testing yourself. You won’t do yourself any favors by failing to thoroughly reconstruct your map at this stage.

Let the information settle until at least the next day before moving to the next phase. Typically, students finish this phase on weekdays after the lecture and focus on the next phase during the weekend. If you try to do too much at once, you’ll quickly approach your mental limits and diminish your productivity.

Learning:

By actively identifying key concepts, organizing and connecting them using a visual map, critically thinking, and asking key questions, you’re efficiently and effectively learning.

Read Case Study

PRACTICE (Phase 4): Practice by Solving New Problems

You’ve heard this before: practice, practice, practice. Practice is important because it reinforces and tests what you have learned. Practice makes your knowledge permanent, applicable, and transferable to new situations and problems.

To really practice, you must solve new problems. The key here is to apply what you’ve learned to situations you haven’t encountered before. For example, when you learn a new formula, don’t practice using that formula by working problems that are simply altered versions of the example problem; rather, practice on problems that manipulate the equation in a new way. When applied properly, this phase tests your ability to apply what you’ve learned so far, and, just as importantly, what you may have missed (i.e., what gaps, if any, exist in your understanding and visual maps). In a series of recent experiments, educational researchers showed that by generating answers to challenging questions (i.e., key questions and new problems) we can improve our learning.13 It is therefore very important that key questions and new problems steer your learning, that you attempt to answer these questions and problems before looking up solutions, and that you learn from your mistakes (mistakes are an important component of learning).

The practice phase should be done within the same week as the lecture (e.g., the weekend after). Before you begin practicing what you learned, review the material first. Make sure that you can still recreate all the concepts in your visual map. Only then should you start doing practice problems.

INPUTS

Sources of information:

Existing knowledge on the topic.

Other tools and handouts you will be allowed to use on your exam.

New problems solved under exam conditions, i.e., without visual maps or open textbooks. The new problems could come from the textbook, old exams, the Internet, your teacher, and your classmates.

THE 4 REPEATING STEPS

Identify key concepts:

In this phase, you’re essentially practicing what you’ll be expected to know and do on a course exam. In essence, you have to be able to apply ideas and processes.

Approach the practice phase as if you were taking a real exam (i.e., book closed and visual map put away). Solve new problems using your existing knowledge. Many students undertake this phase by following an already worked-out example and then repeating the same problem with only slightly altered variables. When you “practice” this way, you don’t solve anything; the book solves the problem for you. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking otherwise.

Strive to solve problems without mistakes. “Correct” is not the same as “almost correct,” especially with multiple-choice questions. When you do make mistakes, learn from them and make sure you understand the thinking process required to reach the correct answer. Integrate key concepts into your visual map and update it as necessary to incorporate what you just learned from your inability to solve the problem correctly.

Add references into visual map notes (e.g., page in the book where the problem you got wrong appears), if desired.

Practice on different types of new problems. Some problems test your ability to recall information (different from being able to recognize), others to organize and communicate (e.g., essays), and still others to apply knowledge (e.g., math problems, interpretation of legal arguments, chemical reactions).

Practice on difficult and easy problems and short and long problems. However, focus most of your energy on problems that you get wrong and that give you the most difficulty.

Don’t force solutions when they just don’t come to you. Take a break and let your subconscious do the thinking, or consult your teacher or classmates.

Organize and connect key concepts in your visual map in a meaningful way:

You should update and revise your visual map immediately after solving the problem and learning something new.

Think critically:

Be fully aware and inquisitive (review step 3 in Section 3.3).

Ask key questions:

Identifying remaining questions and attempting to answer them is critical at this point so that your understanding of the subject matter is as complete as possible before moving to the produce phase.

OUTPUTS

Revised visual map:

This is your final version of the visual map before taking your exam.

Show your map to your teacher. In the same amount of time it would take for her to solve one problem with you, she will be able to critique your understanding of an entire chapter by looking at your visual map.

Key questions for the next phase:

You shouldn’t have any. If you do, make sure to get them answered any way you can (e.g., additional research, classmates, teacher, class, study group) or you’ll regret it when you take the exam.

Prepared for the produce phase:

Have you answered and integrated all your key questions?

Can you recreate your visual map completely and without mistakes?

Can you explain the subject matter in your own words?

Could you teach others about the subject (the greatest proof that you’ve mastered the material)?

How can you use what you’ve learned?

Learning:

By actively identifying key concepts, organizing and connecting them using a visual map, critically thinking, asking key questions, and practicing, you’re efficiently and effectively learning.

Read Case Study

PRODUCE (Phase 5): Produce Results and New Ideas

The last phase of the 5Ps process can be divided into two parts. First part, in which you ace your exams, is easily attainable. The second part, where you produce new ideas and concepts, is more ambitious. Although all of the phases allow for and encourage the creation of new ideas, this is particularly intrinsic to Phase 5.

Learning does not stop in this phase. In fact, Phase 5 requires a great leap forward in your thinking in that you must now begin to apply your knowledge to real applications and situations. This involves producing creative and innovative ideas, combining unrelated concepts, and finding meaning in chaos. To do this, you must be able to reason through analysis (breaking a whole into components; guided by the left brain) and synthesis (weaving components into a whole; guided by the right brain).14 Note that both of these components are deeply embedded in CLM, enabling you to use both sides of your brain as you learn and produce new ideas. These are the skills that will enable you to succeed and, indeed, excel in both your studies and life.

It’s also important to note that we live in a world where technology greatly influences how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn. 15Although learning has always been essentially social in nature because it is based on the accumulated and disseminated knowledge of others, this is even more true today, given the degree to which digital tools have facilitated access to information and increased our ability to communicate and collaborate. Take advantage of this global network of knowledge and fellow learners. Maintaining and nurturing social connections can only help you facilitate and widen the scope of your learning.

INPUTS

Sources of information:

Existing knowledge.

Exams

THE 4 REPEATING STEPS

Identify key concepts:

What key concepts is this problem testing?

Organize and connect key concepts in your visual map in a meaningful way:

You should update and revise your visual map as soon as possible after the exam.

Think critically:

Be fully aware and inquisitive (review step 3 in Section 3.3).

Ask key questions:

These questions are dictated by the exam.

OUTPUTS

Revised visual map:

You probably realize by now that your visual map is never quite complete. Take what you learn from exams and incorporate it into your visual map so you can use it on your next exam and final exam

Integrate important concepts from the exam.

Key questions for further learning:

What went right and what went wrong on the exam? How and why? How can you improve for your next exam?

Reflect on what and how you did with the 5Ps and 4 steps. What worked very well? What didn’t work well? How can you further refine your specific actions with the 5Ps and 4 steps to improve your learning and your grades, and minimize your time and effort in reaching those goals?

Prepared for the next 5Ps process:

Improve your performance on the next topic you’ll be learning.

Learning:

By actively identifying key concepts, organizing and connecting them using a visual map, critically thinking, asking key questions, and producing results and new ideas, you’re efficiently and effectively learning.

Read Case Study

3.5 Summary

As you can see, CLM is an intuitive and easy yet extremely powerful learning method. CLM gives you the ability to collect and meaningfully integrate all your course-related information quickly and easily, so that all relevant information is deposited in one place and arranged in a meaningful way to reflect your understanding. This is a skill that will serve you well not only in school but also in your life.

As the burden to integrate more and more information grows, both in and out of academic settings, it is clear that learning needs to be sustainable in order to maintain high performance. The CLM should be an essential part of your daily routine. Learning always comes first. If for some reason you fall behind in a class, put the CLM into practice immediately on the new material, slowly filling in missing past concepts as you come across them and you need them. Don’t waste time correcting the past at the expense of the future. If you want to succeed, put CLM into practice now.

Learning is a process like any other. It has to be managed by monitoring its effectiveness. As you’re learning, keep an eye out for what works and what doesn’t work so you can refine your next learning cycle. Through this performance management and reflection, you’ll be able to optimize the CLM so it’s unique to you and, thus, ideally suited to help you learn the important and essential content.

Now is the time to embrace CLM so you can overcome barriers to learning and put yourself in an excellent position to not merely survive your classes but rather to ace them and become a stronger and better learner in the process.

Start learning today. The earlier you start and the more you learn, the better you’ll become at learning and creating new ideas.

3.6 Additional Resources

Web Resources

Handpicked Web recommendations are available at
http://conciselearning.com/howtolearn.html.

Books

Handpicked book recommendations are available at
http://conciselearning.com/studyskillsbooks.html.

CHAPTER 4

APPLYING CLM
TO YOUR LIFE

4.1 CLM: Your Way to Effective and Efficient Learning

Congratulations; you’ve come a long way!

By now, you’ve realized that everyone has the learning capacity to get As. You’ve also seen how CLM completely transforms your learning from trivial to meaningful. This learning transformation happens through a five-phase process in which you meaningfully organize and connect key concepts through a visual map by critically thinking and asking key questions.

4.2 The Missing Ingredient: YOU

For success to come to you, both in college and in life, you must want it and take steps to pursue it. Your education and your success are your responsibility, and both require that you become a self-directed, motivated, lifelong learner.

It’s very simple: all the certificates, diplomas, and tools in the world won’t make one bit of difference unless you take responsibility and put what you learn into practice. Ultimately, you are responsible for your learning performance, learning development, strengthening of your learning skills, and realizing success in college, career, and life.

Let the principles you’ve learned in this book be your guide, and you’ll definitely become more successful in college and in life. It’s not essential that you follow the entire book word for word; rather, take the parts that resonate with you and make them your own. Have fun along the way, and don’t look for an easy way out because shortcuts won’t get you very far.

You can be successful, but it’s completely up to you. Accept and value being in control of your learning, and put into practice the strategies that you just learned. You’ll see immediate and long-term results.

4.3 Your Future Is NOW

You’re at a point where this book ends and you begin. All paths are wide open to you.

Efficient and effective learning is within reach as soon as you put into practice what you learned in this book. Changing old ways and adopting new methods does not happen overnight. It happens with intention, practice, and persistence. So make the committment to put CLM into use immediately and keep them in use, while constantly improving, until they become second nature. Once that happens, success is not far away.

4.4 You Can’t Be Successful Without Lifelong Learning

Learning does not end in college. In fact, research shows that your brain is capable of learning throughout life. The brain literally restructures and reorganizes neural pathways via new inputs and experiences throughout our lives. This process is called neuroplasticity.16

Learning never ends. This means you have to embrace becoming a lifelong learner, which requires:

Keeping your brain stimulated throughout your life.

Not clinging to your old ways when they’re not giving you the results you want.

Accepting responsibility for your success and changing what’s not working so that you can be successful.

Staying informed and engaged.

Becoming an independent thinker and leader.

Being inspired to think and develop new ideas.

Transforming information into knowledge through learning.

Learning new skills throughout life.

Ultimately, success comes to those who fully embrace and engage in lifelong learning, those who have applied the concepts of knowledge integration and critical thinking to their lives by drawing on real-world problem solving and interaction with others. This involves an adjustment in mindset. It involves making learning a part of your lifestyle.

Read more about lifelong learning in the Bonus Chapter.

4.5 Success Is a Way of Living

Through the years, I’ve asked quite a few parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents about the most important lesson(s) they have learned from their lives. After all, they’ve been through what we’re going through, in their own way, so they should have many useful experience-based lessons to share. As expected, they offered lots of excellent advice.

Here are two of those life lessons that I have taken to heart and live by:

Don’t have any regrets.

Do your best with the opportunities and challenges that come your way. This will bring you inner satisfaction and peace of mind, regardless of the outcome.

Don’t lose your fun and curious inner child.

Children are naturally curious. They see life as a fun adventure where they never stop exploring and learning. Keep your inner child alive; otherwise, you will find the world to be a frightening, disappointing, and lonely place.

I hope that you put into practice what you’ve learned in this book. You’ll soon discover that success is measured not by how much money you’ve accumulated, but rather by whether you have lived to your fullest potential and done your best. Best wishes for success in school and life.

4.6 Additional Resources

Web

Handpicked web recommendations are available at
http://conciselearning.com/studentsuccessquotes.html.

Books

Handpicked book recommendations are available at
http://conciselearning.com/studyskillsbooks.html.

BONUS CHAPTER

Lifelong Learning with CLM

6.1 Why a Chapter on Lifelong Learning?

After the publication of Concise Learning and How to Study with Mind Maps (HTSWMM), I began receiving many e-mails from working professionals. Although some commented on how they had adapted the Concise Learning Method (CLM) to their work lives, thereby becoming more productive knowledge workers, others expressed disappointment that the book didn’t specifically address how to use CLM for lifelong learning in the workplace.

This bonus chapter attempts to meet that need. Students, however, have not been left out. Although it’s written with professionals in mind, both those working at companies and those working independently, students will also find value in the chapter, especially those students about to graduate and experience the opportunities and challenges of life outside of the classroom.

6.2 Professionals Are Students, Too

Learning does not stop when we leave school. As professionals, we continue learning, extending the process that began when we were kids and continued through our years in school.

As evidenced by the many things we learn prior to ever entering school, one doesn’t have to sit in a classroom for learning to happen. Neither does one necessarily need a teacher; teachers are just one source of information. They are important, certainly, but not necessary for learning to occur, especially when it comes to lifelong learning, which most often takes place outside of a classroom.

Learning among students and professionals remains very similar; it’s only the learning metrics and outputs that change. Product deliverables and performance reviews take the place of exams and pop quizzes, and the consequences of “failing” at the former are arguably far weightier than the latter. If you are an entrepreneur, there are also informal evaluations from your customers, who will “fire” you and your company by taking their business elsewhere if your goods and services do not meet their expectations. Regardless of whether you’re in a classroom or a boardroom, or by what metrics you measure success, you must answer the same all-important question: do you learn as little as you can get away with or do you learn as much as you can to deliver outstanding work? Ultimately, you are responsible for your own learning.

6.3 Importance of Lifelong Learning

I like the Wikipedia definition of lifelong learning: “Lifelong learning is the continuous building of skills and knowledge throughout the life of an individual. It occurs through experiences, formal or informal, encountered in the course of a lifetime.”¹ Lifelong learning takes place at all times and in all places, not just in school. It is a continuous process that starts at birth and ends when we die.

We learn in order to become educated. But what makes an “educated person?” Socrates and Confucius considered this question centuries ago, and as the world has changed, so has the definition of an educated person. It continues to evolve to this day, now taking into account the increasing role of technology in education and learning. A summary of skills that make an educated person, as compiled by Harvard and Princeton, are shown in this visual map.²

There are many other skills that one could include in such a list, and each person has his or her own unique criteria. What’s on your list?

You might notice that many of the skills recognized by both Harvard and Princeton as hallmarks of an educated person are “real-world” skills. But if these are the skills deemed important for education and success by two of the most respected universities in the world, why do we tend to focus so much on grades as the measure of a truly educated person? Students have been conditioned to believe that the only way to get an education is to go through a formalized schooling process, get good grades, and get a degree, when they should have also been encouraged to focus on acquiring the real-world skills, capabilities, and mindsets that can help one get ahead in the real world.³ Lifelong learning is about educating yourself in the areas formal academic training doesn’t cover.

Lifelong learning is critical to thriving at work and growing professionally. Keeping up in your field is essential to doing your job, both the day-to-day tasks and undertaking new projects, and it’s especially important when considering new career paths.

Lifelong learning is also critical to personal success. It can play a role in everything from buying a house to building a life with a partner to raising a child. In fact, undertaking any new endeavor, big or small, benefits from being open to continued learning.

In other words, learning opportunities are everywhere and affect all aspects of our lives and well being -- emotional, interpersonal, mental, physical, and spiritual. When we become aware of these opportunities and act on them, the rewards are evident in the self-improvement we see.

You determine who you will become by how you invest in yourself today and tomorrow. Investing in your learning is the most lucrative type of investing and also the most personally rewarding. The Japanese have a word for constant and lifelong improvement -- Kaizen. The word kai means change and zen means good. Pursuing learning and self-improvement daily will place you on the path of developing your own Kaizen or “good change.”

Here’s a question: how is what you’re doing now related to the subject you majored in? If you’re like me, your current work isn’t remotely related to what you studied in school. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if I hadn’t continued to keep learning after school. If you want success in life, if you want to grow and achieve, then never stop learning. Educate yourself by learning from others, formally and informally, and self-improvement will follow. Your formal education was just a stepping stone, and it’s the informal education that will determine your success in life.

The world is constantly changing and so should you. Entirely new industries are created each year to address needs we couldn’t have imagined a generation ago. The kinds of people who will thrive in this ever-changing environment will be those who can learn, adapt, and be thought leaders. Those people have made a conscious choice to remain active, lifelong learners. You, too, can make that choice.

6.4 Lifelong Learning in the Digital Age

Today, technology plays a critical role in lifelong learning. Thanks to the Internet, in the last two decades we’ve seen more changes in how people learn than were seen in the preceding two centuries. The Internet has completely transformed the learning landscape. Google, Wikipedia, eBooks, YouTube, and a host of other technological advancements have had a profound effect on how we learn, communicate, create, and collaborate. The most important sources of information, including non-Internet sources, are captured in the following visual map.

The abundance of content afforded by all of these sources can lead to information overload, and the flow of information will only continue to increase, along with the difficulty of keeping up with it. Paradoxically, this easy and instantaneous access to large amounts of information can actually impede our learning and create information anxiety -- the fear of missing a very important bit of information -- rather than aid our learning.

6.5 Developing Your Personal Learning Network (PLN)

In addition to formal education, learning occurs via numerous informal connections that we form through both real-world contact and the Internet. The network of these connections, both personal and virtual, is collectively called a Personal Learning Network (PLN). PLNs are created by individual learners to meet those learners’ specific needs and extend learning connections to other learners around the globe who share the same or similar interests. In other words, a PLN is a group of people (e.g., students, academics, experts, professionals, and/or individuals with shared interests) who connect, communicate, and collaborate with the goal of sharing information and ideas to increase understanding of topics of interest and grow professionally. You may know the people in your PLN personally or virtually or both. A key feature of PLNs is that they meet a learner’s specific needs for information and ideas. As such, your PLN will change over time because of the new people you encounter and your changing needs and goals. Just a few years ago, PLNs were limited in scope to personal connections. Now, technology has made it very easy to develop extensive PLNs, bringing together information from people located across the globe.

So how does one go about forming a PLN? Here are some tips from Howard Rheingold⁴, an expert on modern communications, who also happens to be in my PLN.

My own learning has been transformed by my PLN and I can’t imagine doing the work I do without the support of the people in it (see www.linkedin.com/in/tonikrasnic and https://twitter.com/conciselearning for examples of my PLN). By reflecting on ideas introduced by members of my PLN, I bolster my own learning and ability to create new ideas. I also get to know and meet people I would never have the opportunity to meet were it not for the advantages afforded by technology.

People learn through their connections to other people and new ideas. If you’re serious about lifelong learning, you must be serious about developing your PLN. By doing so, you’ll be able to learn just about anything, anytime, anywhere and connect with anybody, helping you grow and create and, in turn, contribute to your PLN in ways that help others grow and create. For additional resources on PLN and lifelong learning, visit http://www.scoop.it/t/lifelong-learning.

6.6 Design Your Personal Learning Plan

As discussed in Section 6.3, you can’t rely on your school education to suffice for the rest of your life. If you want to stay ahead, you need to commit to self-directed, lifelong learning, develop your PLN, and take responsibility for your own personal and professional development.

Lifelong learners are eager for new learning and are motivated by learning itself. They are also goal-directed and know how to set challenging learning goals, organize resources to facilitate learning, and monitor their progress. They also know how to sustain the effort and foster the resilience that reaching their learning goals will require.

Each learner is unique and, thus, learning is most effective when it’s personalized. That happens when learners take an active role in shaping what and how they learn and then put their learning into action. The following visual map shows one example of a self-directed learning plan. This plan may serve as a template for some learners, whereas others may find it useful only as a starting point.

As you no doubt noticed, a large part of the above personal learning plan involves taking action. Your PLP is only the first step in your personal development. The “doing” step is what really counts. Reading, researching, and planning are great, but they will amount to nothing if you don’t act on what you’ve learned.

6.7 Why Use CLM for Lifelong Learning?

As noted in Section 6.4, the Internet has completely changed and continues to shape the way we learn. To effectively manage the vast amounts of information we can now access anywhere and at any time, we need a learning framework that helps us cull key concepts from multiple sources, including PLNs, and then organize and connect those key concepts. Having such a framework to filter content and, of equal importance, help us derive meaning from that content will become essential for managing information overload. One such framework is CLM.

A number of learning theories apply in particular to adult learning, including action learning, experiential learning, project-based learning, and self-directed learning. Of these, self-directed learning is at the heart of adult education because of its learner-centered focus.⁵

Self-directed learning is an example of the kind of informal learning discussed earlier. It is defined as the process by which individuals take responsibility for their own learning by identifying their personal learning needs, setting goals, developing personal learning plans, taking actions, and evaluating the outcomes. Section 6.6 discussed how to design your personal learning plan.

CLM was built on the foundation of self-directed learning. The discussion below outlines the five characteristics (5Cs) of CLM for lifelong learning. These are the five pillars of CLM, the most important of which is self-directed learning.

Controlled (Self-Directed)

When we were in school, teachers decided what we read, what we talked about in class, and what we investigated for homework. Luckily, those days are long gone for professionals.

Once we leave the classroom, our education is no longer tied to time and location. In the workplace, we decide what, when, where, and how we learn. We set our own goals, which drive our learning. Some learn best from books, articles, or online, whereas others may find that taking courses works best. Regardless, learning is self-directed, that is, the learner makes decisions on what to learn and how to learn.

Connective (Personal Inquiry)

Personal inquiry is a natural way for learning to occur. By exploring, seeking information, questioning, and experimenting, we make information relevant to us, and information must be relevant to stick. Curiosity is required.

We make sense of information by making connections to prior experiences, knowledge, and other concepts. The more connections we make, the more neural pathways are created and strengthened, and the more potential there is for new information to become relevant. It’s like anything else in life: the more frequently we do something, the easier it becomes. Hence, the more connections we already have, the smoother and faster new connections will be formed, helping us learn new ideas more completely and discover new ideas more easily.

Constructive (Meaningful Learning)

We can consume information all day long, thinking we’re educating ourselves, but unless we can make sense of that information, we haven’t learned anything.

For meaningful learning to occur, new information must be integrated with existing knowledge. Constructing meaning requires that we ask key questions as we sift through new information, extract the important concepts, combine new concepts with existing knowledge via an ever-expanding network of connections and pathways, and think about what we’re learning. We are the constructors of our knowledge.

Creative (New Ideas)

This is perhaps the most important pillar of CLM. Once we form connections among concepts, we next fully integrate those concepts, making them our own. We can then begin applying our understanding to novel situations.

For years, education systems, by design, have turned out individuals who do exactly what they are told to do. This is never ideal, but it is particularly problematic in the workplace. If you only do exactly what your boss tells you to do or exactly what the job requires of you and nothing more, what will stop your boss from finding someone else to do your job more cheaply?⁶

To escape this trap, we must do our work in a way that that makes us indispensable.⁷ We must create new ideas. This is not easy, and many people are afraid to stand out by presenting new ideas, but it’s the only way to become irreplaceable, to make your boss appreciate your work. Of equal importance from a personal growth standpoint, it’s the only way to make work adventurous, exciting, and fun. For independent professionals, the stakes are even higher. To stay ahead of the competition and satisfy their customers, it’s imperative that they constantly learn and innovate.

Collaborative (Sharing of Ideas)

We can internally mold and shape ideas forever, but if we don’t want those ideas to stagnate, we have to share them at some point. There is, of course, inherent risk in sharing. We don’t know how others will respond to our ideas. But the potential rewards are greater. By sharing an idea, we get to test it in the real world, get valuable feedback, and discover new relationships with others who are interested in similar ideas. More importantly, sharing our ideas allows those ideas to potentially help someone else.

Learning with CLM is self-directed and guided by inquiry. With CLM, we make connections, learn meaningfully, and create and share new ideas. And since CLM facilitates learning through visual mapping of key concepts, the learning is highly engaging and interactive. As we edit the maps, concepts and connections come alive and the puzzle pieces of information fit together into a larger, more complete picture. Mapping also sustains our motivation because we get constant feedback and gratification through seeing the development of our map and, hence, our learning.

6.8 How to Use CLM for Lifelong Learning?

We all consume lots of information every day; some of it is useful and a lot of it is not. By carefully selecting your PLN, you’ll get more relevant information. But even if you’re reading lots of high-quality material and have a great PLN, you still aren’t necessarily learning. What constitutes real learning is not so much the information itself, but rather the learner’s ability to identify relevant information and pay attention to key concepts and then reflect on, make sense of, and meaningfully transform that information into knowledge. The final step is then applying that knowledge to real-world situations. Unless we can make sense of information in a meaningful way, it’s just entertainment, not education.

Although tools such as visual maps can greatly facilitate learning, they alone, without a method to guide their application, are insufficient. CLM provides a systematic method for using visual maps to learn. With CLM (see following diagram), learning is achieved via a five-phase process (looking for puzzle pieces), with 4 repeating steps within each phase, that involves meaningfully organizing and connecting key concepts in a visual map (putting together the puzzle pieces), critical thinking, and asking key questions. Through this active, cognitive, and constructive learning process, you integrate new information with existing information, condensing and transforming it into personal and meaningful knowledge.

The 4 repeating steps and the 5Ps (five-phase) process, as they relate to studying in school, are discussed in detail in Sections 3.3 and 3.4, respectively. The discussion below, in the format of visual maps, adds to those two sections from the perspective of lifelong learning.

Step 1: Identify Key Concepts

Step 2: Meaningfully Organize and Connect Concepts

Step 3: Think Critically

Step 4: Ask Key Questions

Now repeat these four steps through the five phases (5Ps): preview (phase 1), participate (phase 2), process (phase 3), practice (phase 4), and produce (phase 5).

The learning process is broken down into 5 phases because you can’t possibly make sense of a large topic in one sitting. It’s only after a number of “visits” to the same topic, looking at it from different perspectives and examining it by asking different questions, that the topic begins to make sense. Scientists have found that only when lab rats take a break from their exploration of a maze do they process the patterns they have encountered in a way that seems to create a persistent memory.⁸ Similarly, breaks between phases are critical to allowing the brain to consolidate and synthesize information, make connections between ideas, and facilitate retrieval of existing knowledge. Although the phases are described as sequential, often that is not the case. For example, as you’re learning about a concept, you might get ideas you can begin applying right away, which might trigger new questions that require additional learning. There is constant movement among the phases and the 4 repeating steps, creating a dynamic, messy interaction that produces learning.

Here is a more detailed look at the 5 phases.

PREVIEW (Phase 1): Preview the Material

PARTICIPATE (Phase 2): Participate Actively

PROCESS (Phase 3): Process All Materials Into Your Visual Map

PRACTICE (Phase 4): Practice by Solving New Problems

PRODUCE (Phase 5): Produce Results and New Ideas

Summary

I like to describe CLM as an ongoing learning journey on which one is continuously pursuing and discovering new knowledge, improving one’s understanding, and creating new ideas. The basics of learning, such as filtering key concepts, repetition, reinforcement, and deep processing, are all important features embedded within CLM, but the most important attributes of CLM are making connections, deep thinking, inquiry through questions, meaningful learning, and applying what you’ve learned.

Learning is most effective when it’s personally meaningful to the learner. That happens when you take ownership of your learning by developing your PLN, shaping what and how you learn, engaging fully in your own learning, and applying what you’ve learned. Although CLM is not a single, one-size-fits-all solution, I hope you find it to be a useful framework, one you can customize and adjust to optimize your personal learning.

6.9 What To Do Next

Now that you’ve successfully plowed your way through the book, are you wondering what to do next?

My suggestion: start mapping! We learn most by doing. Put the book away and make your first map. By mapping, you’ll put into practice what you’ve learned, and that will keep you motivated to keep learning and doing.

If you need inspiration, look through some of the 250,000 maps at http://www.biggerplate.com or through my compilations at http://pinterest.com/mindmaps.

You can also visit my website, www.ConciseLearning.com/lifelonglearning, for examples of visual maps used for lifelong learning, including personal dashboards, product summaries, self-development, training, and book summaries.

But beware: you don’t really need more reading. You need action. And the sooner you get started, the better.

If mapping for your own learning isn’t a powerful enough motivator, I’ll give you another. If you draw a map you’re particularly proud of and you’d like to share it with someone, e-mail it to me. I’ll take a look, and if you want, I’ll share it with the world on your behalf.

At any time, feel free to get in touch with questions or ideas. All the best to you for fun and productive learning and doing with visual maps.

6.10 References

¹ Wikipedia. Retrieved January 16, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelong_learning

² Personal MBA. Retrieved January 16, 2012, from http://personalmba.com/what-must-an-educated-person-know

³ Ellsberg, M. (2011). Education of millionaires: It’s not what you think and it’s not too late. New York: Portfolio.

⁴ Rheingold, H. Notes on cultivating a personal learning network. Retrieved January 22, 2012, from http://howardrheingoldsteachingnotes.posterous.com/notes-on-growing-a-personal-learning-network

⁵ Marsick, V. J. & Watkins, K. E. (2001). Informal and incidental learning. New Directions for Adult & Continuing Education, 89, 25-34.

⁶ Robinson, K. RSA animate: Changing education paradigms. Retrieved January 16, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

⁷ Godin, S. (2010). Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? New York: Portfolio.

⁸ Karlsson, M., & Frank, L. (2009). Awake replay of remote experience in the hippocampus. Nature Neuroscience, 12(7): 913–918.

⁹ Ritchhart, R., Church, M., & Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. California: Jossey-Bass.

APPENDIX 1

YOUR VISUAL MAP WORKSHEET

APPENDIX 2

LEARNING COMPONENTS

APPENDIX 3

CASE STUDY

To show you how CLM works with a real school subject, I’ve chosen a chemistry topic. I chose chemistry because I’m a chemistry professor but also because students typically find chemistry difficult and I wanted to do a case study on a “difficult” subject.

This material is taken from Chapter 2, section 2.1 of Mark Bishop’s Introduction to Chemistry and has been reprinted and formatted for the purposes of this case study with the author’s permission. Visit http://preparatorychemistry.com for free access to this great book.

A3.1 Applying CLM to the Chemistry Example

Don’t read the entire chemistry section now (A3.2). Instead, skim it as directed in Phase 1 of CLM.

After every phase (P), as discussed in Chapter 3:

Go through the inputs, the 4 repeating steps, and the outputs that are described in each phase.

For each phase, try to develop your own visual map of the chemistry chapter as you would if you were really taking the class.

Compare your visual map to the visual map that I developed. The visual maps won’t be identical, but the key concepts should have been captured completely in both instances.

PREVIEW (Phase 1)

Don’t read the entire chapter.

INPUTS

Sources of information:

Existing knowledge on the topic.

Textbook text (A3.2) and teacher’s lecture notes (A3.3).

Chapter glossary and chapter objectives in textbook (A3.2).

THE 4 REPEATING STEPS

Identify key concepts:

Identify headings and bolded terms in the textbook.

In this case study, the key concepts (primary concepts) are model, solids, liquids, gases, vaporization or evaporation, kinetic molecular theory, and distillation.

Identify any secondary topics that help clarify the primary concepts.

Organize and connect key concepts in your visual map in a meaningful way:

This section of the chapter is divided into four parts: models, solids, liquids, and gases. These will become the primary concepts in your visual map.

Incorporate the key concepts that you’ve previously identified into your visual map using the four headings.

Think critically:

Why does this section matter?

How does it fit in with other sections of the chapter and chemistry overall?

How does this relate to real life?

Ask key questions:

Look at the end-of-chapter questions. They serve as a general guide to your key questions.

How are the three states of matter similar?

How are they different? Why are they different?

How does the kinetic molecular theory explain the three states of matter?

OUTPUTS

Skeleton visual map:

Note how the visual map contains the four headings and all the key concepts (primary concepts) you previously identified.

Key secondary concepts are also captured under primary concepts.

Key questions for the next phase:

What else is missing?

Prepared for participate phase:

You’ve acquired a general idea about the topic.

You’ve also gained valuable insight and focus that you can take to the lecture.

Learning:

By actively identifying key concepts, organizing and connecting them using a visual map, critically thinking, and asking key questions, you’re efficiently and effectively learning.

PARTICIPATE (Phase 2)

INPUTS

Sources of information:

Existing knowledge on the topic (the visual map you prepared in Phase 1).

Lecture notes (A3.3).

THE 4 REPEATING STEPS

Identify key concepts:

What are the new key concepts that you need to add to your visual map?

Capture important teacher cues.

Organize and connect key concepts in your visual map in a meaningful way:

How do the new concepts fit with your existing concepts?

Is there a better way to arrange the key concepts in your visual map?

Think critically:

Are there any patterns?

Does this make sense?

Where is the emphasis?

Ask key questions:

How does one state of matter change to another state of matter? Why?

How can one separate different states of matter?

OUTPUTS

Revised visual map:

Notice that the revised visual map has changed in a number of ways to reflect the lecture material and teacher’s emphasis.

“!” was added to topics where the teacher put a lot of emphasis.

“?” was added to topics that still don’t make sense. You can ask for clarification after class or refer to the textbook in Phase 3.

Some text was corrected to improve accuracy.

Some missing details were added.

Key questions for the next phase:

What still doesn’t make sense?

What else do you need to know to increase your understanding of the three states of matter?

Are there only three states of matter? Why only three?

Prepared for process phase:

You’ve just captured and integrated the entire lecture into one visual map. Notice how your revised visual map is much more elaborate than the skeleton visual map.

Learning:

By actively identifying key concepts, organizing and connecting them using a visual map, critically thinking, and asking key questions, you’re efficiently and effectively learning.

PROCESS (Phase 3)

INPUTS

Sources of information:

Existing knowledge on the topic (the visual map you prepared in Phase 1 and refined in Phase 2).

Textbook text, chapter glossary, and chapter objectives in textbook (A3.2).

THE 4 REPEATING STEPS

Identify key concepts:

Now is the time to actively read the textbook to fill in the missing information in your visual map.

Read with purpose. Skim unimportant text and focus on key concepts required to complete your understanding of the three states of matter.

Organize and connect key concepts in your visual map in a meaningful way:

Add new key concepts. However, don’t simply accumulate notes. You should be constantly combining, consolidating, revising, and organizing your visual map.

Think critically:

Is there a better way to summarize this information?

Are all the key concepts connected and organized in the best way?

Does this make sense?

Ask key questions:

Revisit the end-of-chapter questions to get a sense of what questions you’ve already answered and what questions remain unanswered.

Is vaporization the only phase change? What are the others?

What other states of matter exist?

OUTPUTS

Revised visual map:

Notice that the visual map has changed in a number of ways to reflect information from the textbook and your understanding of the three states of matter.

This is the phase during which you’re making a personal contribution to the visual map and fine-tuning your understanding of the material.

Use this phase to answer all your previous key questions and to clarify confusing concepts with the help of the textbook and other resources.

Rearrange the key concepts so that they make more sense (notice, for example, that I moved “evaporation” from the “gases” key concept to the “liquids” key concept).

Add material not found in your textbook. For example, I had a question about other states of matter and other phase changes, so I did some research on the Internet and incorporated the information I found into the visual map.

Add personal examples and notes related to key concepts, as I have done with the shape and volume examples under the newly added “solids, liquids, and gases at constant temperature” key concept.

Summarize information with tables or other visual tools, as I have done for “shape and volume of the three states of matter.”

Key questions for the next phase:

What else do you need to know to increase your understanding of the topic?

Can you apply what you have learned thus far?

Prepared for practice phase:

You’ve now acquired and integrated additional concepts, revised the concepts and the framework as necessary, and, in turn, deepened your understanding and strengthened your memory.

Simply creating visual maps is not enough; you must be able to recreate them. You should be able to recall and explain the entire visual map that you’ve constructed. Be honest when testing yourself. You won’t do yourself any favors by failing to thoroughly reconstruct your map at this stage.

Learning:

By actively identifying key concepts, organizing and connecting them using a visual map, critically thinking, and asking key questions, you’re efficiently and effectively learning.

PRACTICE (Phase 4)

INPUTS

Sources of information:

Existing knowledge on the topic (the visual map you prepared and refined in Phases 1–3).

Other tools and handouts that you will be allowed to use on your exam.

New problems solved under exam conditions. The new problems could come from the textbook (A3.2: review questions, chapter problems, and discussion questions), old exams, your teacher, the Internet, and your classmates.

THE 4 REPEATING STEPS

Identify key concepts:

In this phase, you’re essentially practicing what you’ll be expected to know and do on a course exam. In essence, you have to be able to apply the ideas and processes that you’ve learned in Phases 1–3.

Organize and connect key concepts in your visual map in a meaningful way:

Update and revise your visual map immediately after learning something new from solving problems.

When you make mistakes, strive to understand why and revisit your visual map to see if you need to make changes in response to your inability to solve the problem correctly.

Think critically:

Does the problem make sense?

Have you solved a similar problem in the past?

What are the steps needed to solve this problem?

Ask key questions:

What key concept is this problem testing?

Can you solve the problem with what you already know?

Do you need to update your visual map?

Is your visual map complete and accurate?

OUTPUTS

Revised visual map:

This is your final version of the visual map before taking your exam.

Notice that the revised visual map has changed in a number of ways to reflect information gleaned from solving new problems.

Add unfamiliar concepts you’ve encountered while solving new problems, as I’ve done with “definition of matter.”

Add new concepts that you didn’t encounter in the text, such as the “effect of coolant on the freezing and boiling point of water” and “sublimation.”

Add new details that you thought were unimportant but which you encountered in the problems that you were solving, as I’ve done with “average distance between particles is about 10x diameter of each particle.”

Notice how you’ve integrated almost 10 pages of textbook text and 10 PowerPoint slides into a one-page visual map!

Key questions for the next phase:

You shouldn’t have any. If you do, make sure to get them answered any way you can (e.g., additional research, classmates, teacher, class, study group) or you’ll regret it when you sit down to take the exam.

Prepared for produce phase:

Have you answered and integrated all your key questions?

Can you recreate your visual map completely and without mistakes?

Can you explain the subject matter in your own words?

Could you teach others what you know?

Learning:

By actively identifying key concepts, organizing and connecting them using a visual map, critically thinking, and asking key questions, you’re efficiently and effectively learning.

PRODUCE (Phase 5)

INPUTS

Sources of information:

Existing knowledge (the visual map that you prepared and revised in Phases 1–4).

Exams.

THE 4 REPEATING STEPS

Identify key concepts:

What key concepts is this problem testing?

Organize and connect key concepts in your visual map in a meaningful way:

You should update and revise your visual map as soon as possible after the exam.

Think critically:

Do you understand the problem?

Have you solved a similar problem in the past?

What are the steps needed to solve this problem?

Ask key questions:

What key concept is this problem testing?

How can you solve the problem with what you already know?

OUTPUTS

Revised visual map:

You probably realize by now that your visual map is never quite complete. Take what you learn from exams and incorporate it into your visual map so that you can use it on your next exam and final exam.

Integrate key concepts from the exam.

Key questions for further learning:

What went right and what went wrong on the exam? How and why? How can you improve for your next exam?

Reflect on what and how you did with the 5Ps and 4 steps. What worked very well? What didn’t work well? How can you further refine your specific actions with the 5Ps and 4 steps to improve your learning and your grades, and minimize your time and effort in reaching those goals?

Prepared for the next 5Ps process:

You’re armed with improvements that you can now apply to your next 5Ps process.

Learning:

By actively identifying key concepts, organizing and connecting them using a visual map, critically thinking, and asking key questions, you’re efficiently and effectively learning.

A3.2 Textbook text

2.1 Solids, Liquids, and Gases

A chemist’s primary interest, as described in Chapter 1, is the behavior of matter, but to understand the behavior of matter, we must first understand its internal structure. What are the internal differences between the granite of Half Dome in Yosemite, the olive oil added to your pasta sauce, and the helium in a child’s balloon? A simple model of the structure of matter will help us begin to answer this question.

A model is a simplified approximation of reality. For example, architects often build a model of a construction project before actual construction begins. The architect’s model is not an exact description of the project, but it is still very useful as a representation of what the structure will be like. Scientific models are like the architects’ models; they are simplified but useful representations of something real. In science, however, the models are not always physical entities. Sometimes they are sets of ideas instead.

In the last hundred years, there has been a tremendous increase in our understanding of the physical world, but much of that understanding is based on extremely complicated ideas and mathematics. The application of the most sophisticated forms of these modern ideas is difficult, and not very useful to those of us who are not well trained in modern physics and high-level mathematics. Therefore, scientists have developed simplified models for visualizing, explaining, and predicting physical phenomena. For example, we are about to examine a model that will help you visualize the tiny particles of the solid metal in a car’s engine block, the liquid gasoline in the cars tank, and the gaseous exhaust fumes that escape from its tail pipe. The model will help you understand why solids have constant shape and volume at a constant temperature, why liquids have a constant volume but can change their shape, and why gases can easily change both their shape and volume. Our model of the structure of solids, liquids, and gases says that

All matter is composed of tiny particles. (We will start by picturing these as tiny spheres.)

These particles are in constant motion

The amount of motion is related to temperature. Increased temperature reflects increased motion.

Solids, gases, and liquids differ in the freedom of motion of their particles and in how strongly the particles attract each other.

Solids

Why does the metal in a car’s engine block retain its shape as you drive down the road while the fuel in the car’s gas tank conforms to the shape of the tank? What’s happening on the submicroscopic level when solid metal is melted to a liquid, and why can molten metal take the shape of a mold used to form an engine block? Our model will help us to answer these questions.

According to our model, the particles of a solid can be pictured as spheres held closely together by strong mutual attractions. (Figure 2.1). All the particles are in motion, bumping and tugging one another. Because they’re so crowded and exert such strong mutual attractions, however, they only jostle in place. Picture yourself riding on particle 1 in Figure 2.1. An instant before the time captured in the figure, your particle was bumped by particle 3 and sent toward particle 5. (The curved lines in the figure represent the momentary direction of each particle’s motion and its relative velocity.) This motion continues until the combination of a bump from particle 5 and tugging from particles 2, 3, and 4 quickly bring you back toward your original position. Perhaps your particle will now head toward particle 2 at a greater velocity than it had before, but again, a combination of bumps and tugs will send you back into the small space between the same particles. A ride on any of the particles in a solid would be a wild one, with constant changes in direction and velocity, but each particle will occupy the same small space and have the same neighbors.

When a solid is heated, the average speed of the moving particles increases. Faster-moving particles collide more violently, causing each particle to push its neighbors farther away. Therefore, an increase in temperature usually causes a solid to expand somewhat (Figure 2.1).

Liquids

If any solid is heated enough, the movements of the particles become sufficiently powerful to push the other particles around them completely out of position. Look again at Figure 2.1. If your particle is moving fast enough, it can push adjacent particles out of the way entirely and move to a new position. For those adjacent particles to make way for yours, however, they must push the other particles around them aside. In other words, for one particle to move out of its place in a solid, all of the particles must be able to move. The organized structure collapses, and the solid becomes a liquid.

Particles in a liquid are still close together, but there is generally more empty space between them then in a solid. Thus, when a solid substance melts to form a liquid, it usually expands to fill a slightly larger volume. Even so, attractions between the particles keep them a certain average distance apart, so the volume of the liquid stays constant at a constant temperature. On the other hand, because the particles in a liquid are moving faster and there is more empty space between them, the attractions are easily broken and reformed, and the particles change location freely. Eventually, each particle gets a complete tour of the container. This freedom of movement allows liquids to flow, taking on the shape of their container. It is this freedom of movement that allows liquid metal to be poured into a mold where it takes the shape of an engine block (Figure 2.2).

Gases

If you’ve ever spilled gasoline while filling your car, you know how quickly the smell finds your nose. Our model can help you understand why.

Picture yourself riding on a particle in liquid gasoline. Because the particle is moving throughout the liquid, it will eventually come to the liquid’s surface. Its direction of movement may carry it beyond the surface into the space above the liquid, but the attraction of the particles behind it will most likely draw it back again. On the other hand, if your particle is moving fast enough, it can move far enough away from the other particles to break the attractions pulling it back. This is process by which liquid is converted to gas. The coversion of liquid to gas is called vaporization or evaporation (Figure 2.3).

You might also have noticed, while pumping gasoline, that the fumes smell stronger on a hot day than on a cold day. When the gasoline’s temperature is higher, its particles are moving faster and are therefore more likely to escape from the liquid, so that more of them reach your nose.

The particles of a gas are much farther apart than in a solid or liquid. In the air around us, for example, the average distance between particles is about ten times the diameter of each particle. This leads to the gas particles themselves taking up only about 0.1% of the total volume. The other 99.9% of the total volume is empty space. In contrast, the particles of a liquid fill about 70% of the liquid’s total volume. According to the model, each particle in a gas moves freely in a straight-line path until it collides with another gas particle or with the particles of a liquid or solid. The particles are usually with moving fast enough to break any attraction that might form between them, so after two particles collide, they bounce off each other and continue on their way alone.

Picture yourself riding on a gas particle at the instant captured in Figure 2.4. You are so far away from any other particles that you think you are alone in the container. An instant later, you collide with a particle that seems to have come out of nowhere. The collision changes your direction and velocity. In the next instant, you are again moving freely, as if your particle was the only one in the universe.

Unlike the liquid, which has a constant volume, the rapid, ever-changing, and unrestricted movement of the gas particles allows gases to expand to fill any shape or volume of container. The movement also allows our cars’ exhaust gases to move freely out of the cars and into the air we breathe.

You can review the information in this section and see particles of solids, liquids, and gases in motion at the textbook’s Web site.

Chapter Glossary

Model: A simplified approximation of reality.
Solid: The state in which a substance has a definite shape and volume at a constant temperature.
Liquid: The state in which a substance has a constant volume at a constant temperature but can change its shape.
Gas: The state in which a substance can easily change shape and volume.
Evaporation or vaporization: The conversion of a liquid to a gas.

Chapter Objectives

Describe solids, liquids, and gases in terms of the particle nature of matter, the degree of motion of the particles, and the degree of attraction between the particles.

Describe the relationship between temperature and particle motion.

Explain why solids have a definite shape and volume at a constant temperature.

Explain why solids usually expand when heated.

Describe the structural changes that occur when a solid is converted into a liquid by heating.

Explain why most substances expand when they change from a solid to a liquid.

Explain why liquids adjust to take the shape of their container and why they have a constant volume at a constant temperature.

Describe the structural changes that occur in the conversion of a liquid to a gas.

Explain why gases expand to take the shape and volume of their container.

Review Questions

1. Define the term matter.
2. Look around you. What do you see that has a length of about a meter? What do you see that has a mass of about a gram?

Complete the following statements by writing one of these words or phrases in each blank.

10⁻¹⁰; 10⁻¹⁵; 1/100,000; 24; 114; 0.1%; 70%; 99.9%; atomic numbers; attract; chemical; cloud; empty space; escape; expand; expands; extended or shaped; flow; gains; gas; liquid; loses; molecule; motion; neutrons; particles; protons; rapid, ever-changing, and unrestricted; repel; simpler; simplified but useful; single atom; solid; straight-line path; sun; temperature; ten times; vertical column

3. Scientific models are like architects’ models; they are _____________ representations of something real.

4. According to the model presented in this chapter, all matter is composed of tiny _____________.

5. According to the model presented in this chapter, particles of matter are in constant _____________.

6. According to the model presented in this chapter, the amount of motion of particles is proportional to _____________.

7. Solids, gases, and liquids differ in the freedom of motion of their particles and in how strongly the particles _____________ each other.

8. An increase in temperature usually causes a solid to _____________ somewhat.

9. Particles in a liquid are still close together, but there is generally more _____________ between them than in a solid. Thus, when a solid substance melts to form a liquid, it usually _____________ to fill a slightly larger volume.

10. The freedom of movement of particles in a liquid allows liquids to _____________, taking on the shape of their container.

11. When a liquid’s temperature is higher, its particles are moving faster and are therefore more likely to _____________ from the liquid.

12. The average distance between particles in a gas is about _____________ the diameter of each particle. This leads to the gas particles themselves taking up only about _____________ of the total volume. The other _____________ of the total volume is empty space. In contrast, the particles of a liquid fill about _____________ of the liquid’s total volume.

13. According to our model, each particle in a gas moves freely in a(n) _____________ until it collides with another gas particle or with the particles of a liquid or solid.

14. A liquid has a constant volume, but the _____________ movement of the gas particles allows gases to expand to fill a container of any shape or volume.

Chapter Problems

For each of the questions in this section, illustrate your written answers with simple drawings of the particles that form the structures of the substances mentioned. You do not need to be specific about the nature of the particles. Think of them as simple spheres, and draw them as circles.

1. If you heat white sugar very carefully, it will melt.

a. Before you begin to heat the sugar, the sugar granules maintain a constant shape and volume. Why?

b. As you begin to heat the solid sugar, what changes are taking place in its structure?

c. What happens to the sugar’s structure when sugar melts?

2. If the pistons and cylinders in your car engine get too hot, the pistons can get stuck in the cylinders, causing major damage to the engine. Why does this happen?

3. Ethylene glycol, an automobile coolant and antifreeze, is commonly mixed with water and added to car radiators. Because it freezes at a lower temperature than water and boils at a higher temperature than water, it helps to keep the liquid in your radiator from freezing or boiling.

a. At a constant temperature, liquid ethylene glycol maintains a constant volume but takes on the shape of its container. Why?

b. The ethylene glycol/water mixture in your car’s radiator heats up as you drive. What is happening to the particles in the liquid?

c. If you spill some engine coolant on your driveway, it evaporates without leaving any residue. Describe the process of evaporation of liquid ethylene glycol, and explain what happens to the ethylene glycol particles that you spilled.

4. When a small container of liquid ammonia is opened in a classroom, in a short time everyone in the room can smell it.

a. Describe the changes that take place when liquid ammonia vaporizes to form a gas.

b. Why does the gaseous ammonia expand to fill the whole room?

c. Why does the gaseous ammonia occupy a much greater volume than the liquid ammonia?

5. As the summer sun heats up the air at the beach, what is changing for the air particles?

6. A drop of food coloring is added to water. With time, it spreads evenly through the water so that the mixture is all the same color.

a. Describe what is happening to the food coloring and water particles as the coloring spreads into the water.

b. When a drop of food coloring is added to two bowls of water, one at 20 °C and the other at 30 °C, the coloring spreads more quickly in the bowl at the higher temperature. Why?

7. A gaseous mixture of air and gasoline enters the cylinders of a car engine and is compressed into a smaller volume before being ignited. Explain why gases can be compressed.

Discussion Question

When you heat solid iodine, it goes directly from solid to gas. Describe the process by which iodine particles escape from the solid to the gas form. What characteristics must iodine particles have to be able to escape? Draw a picture to illustrate your answer.

A3.3 Lecture notes

These lecture notes are also available in audio format at
http://preparatorychemistry.com/Bishop_Section_2_1.htm.

AFTERWORD

Keep on Learning, Sharing, Teaching, and Inspiring

Once you start getting those As you’ve been aiming for, don’t forget to keep your desire to learn alive and strong. Successful students and leaders keep their minds open to new things because they know there is always more to discover and learn, no matter how much they know.

Finally, part of being a good learner is to give back to others who are trying to learn. Share with others what you’ve learned and also share with them how you learn. It will make a world of difference to others and to you.

Visit the Concise Learning Web Site

You’ll find many free resources at
www.conciselearning.com, including:

Book supplements.

My blog.

My articles.

Latest news.

Web resources.

Famous quotes on learning and success.

Visual map galleries.

Inspirational and instructional videos.

Book recommendations.

Concise Learning store.

Much, much more.

These and other features will be very useful to you and will keep you in touch with others who share your passion for learning and success.

If there are ways to make the Web site even more useful or if you would like to see new features, please let me know about them.

Tell Your Friends

Please tell others who could benefit from this book. They’ll thank you for it.

Attend a Workshop

I’m taking the CLM to schools nationwide. The one-day workshop is taught entirely by me and gives you an opportunity to learn CLM in a face-to-face setting.

The events schedule is available at
http://conciselearning.com/studentsuccessworkshop.html.

E-mail the Author with Questions or Comments

My primary goal is to serve my readers as well as I possibly can. For that to happen, I need to hear from you regarding your experience with CLM.

I’d love to hear your feedback, ideas, questions, comments, successes, struggles, suggestions, or anything else that’s on your mind. I can be reached at profTK@conciselearning.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at
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I hope to continue to serve you and learn from you for many years to come.

REFERENCES

1National Center for Education Statistics. U.S. Department of Education. (2008). Enrollment in postsecondary institutions, fall 2006; Graduation rates, 2000 & 2003 cohorts; and Financial statistics, fiscal year 2006. Washington, DC: Author.

2College Board. (2008). Coming to our senses: Education and the American future. New York: Author.

3Buzan, T., & Buzan, B. (1996). The mind map book: How to use radiant thinking to maximize your brain’s untapped potential. New York: Plume.

4Mind Mapping Software Blog. Retrieved October 20, 2009, from
http://mindmappingsoftwareblog. com/10-reasons-productivity

5Huitt, W. (2003). The information processing approach to cognition. Valdosta, GA: Valdosta State University. Retrieved July 26, 2009, from
http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/cogsys/ infoproc.html

6Anderson, L. W., et al. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s educational objectives. New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

7Novak, J. D., & Cañas, A. J. (2006). The theory underlying concept maps and how to construct and use them. Pensacola, FL: Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Retrieved July 26, 2009, from
http://cmap.ihmc.us/Publications/ResearchPapers/TheoryCmaps/ TheoryUnderlyingConceptMaps.htm

8Ausubel, D. (1968). Educational psychology: A cognitive view. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

9Novak, J. D. (1993). How do we learn our lesson?: Taking students through the process. Science Teacher, 60(3), 50-55.

10ThinkBuzan. Retrieved March 29, 2010, from
http://www.thinkbuzan.com/uk/articles/ mindmappingworks.

11Ross, B., & Munby, H. (1991). Concept mapping and misconceptions: A study of high-school students’ understanding of acids and bases. International Journal of Science Education, 13(1), 11–24.

12Paul, R., & Elder, L (2006). Critical thinking: Learn the tools the best thinkers use. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

13Kornell, N., et al. (2009). Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(4), 989–996.

14Pink, D. H. (2006). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. New York: Riverhead Books.

15Siemens, George (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1). Retrieved March 23, 2010, from
http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm.

16Sprenger, Marilee (1999). Learning & memory: The brain in action. Virginia: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.

Toni Krasnic (profTK), creator of the Concise Learning method and author of Concise Learning, is an education consultant and student success coach. A former professor of chemistry with nearly a decade of college-level teaching experience at both two-year and four-year institutions, including four years at The George Washington University, he knows what works best to help students learn and succeed. He earned his advanced chemistry degree from St. John’s University and his MBA from Zicklin School of Business. He has advised thousands of students on how to become more effective and efficient learners with his breakthrough learning method, helping them achieve success in school and in life.

For more information and free learning resources, visit www.ConciseLearning.com.

THANK YOU!

Thank you for buying and reading this book. I hope you find it useful and recommend it to others.

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