Effective Learning with the Feynman Technique
Conflict resolution in companies: conflict – cooperation – negotiation
Table of Contents
“If you can’t explain it simply, you haven’t understood it well enough” - Albert Einstein
What is the Feynman Technique?
Many of you are probably familiar with this: you spend half the day poring over complex topics from your studies, laboriously trying to get the material to sink in. In the evening, you close the materials and are relieved to have finally understood it. But the very next day, when a fellow student asks you questions about what you've learned, or in the worst case scenario, during the exam, you realize that you have significant gaps in your knowledge and are barely able to keep track of the content. Transfer tasks make you sweat.
The Feynman method is a learning technique that promises to help you memorize things faster and better, as well as to be able to use this knowledge to deduce new facts. It is attributed to the well-known physicist Richard Feynman, who invented and applied this technique during his student days.
The story goes that Feynman and his study group broke down study content to a level that allowed them to explain topics without technical terms or any foreign words, thereby building a much better understanding.
You could compare it to trying to explain things to a child in a way they can understand. No one would think of using technical terms to explain, for example, how clouds form. Instead, we would use the child's vocabulary.
This is precisely where the key to success lies: to be able to explain topics in understandable language, we need to engage with them much more deeply. This helps us develop a different understanding than if we simply memorize.
How does it work?
First of all, you need to know that there are different types of knowledge:
Superficial Knowledge
Superficial knowledge is usually that which we have acquired through mindless memorization. We know that something is called what it is called, or that something is the way it is, but we cannot explain why. Instead, we know a lot of technical vocabulary, but have no idea what we are actually talking about.
In-depth Knowledge
In-depth knowledge is synonymous with understanding. At this level, we have fully grasped a subject and can explain it effortlessly. With this kind of knowledge, we are able to answer transfer tasks, meaning we can abstract from the original content to address other questions. This level of knowledge is achieved using the Feynmann method.
The Steps to Success
The Feynman Technique isn't simply a sequence of steps that you work through to the last step and then automatically become the master of your knowledge. Rather, the learning technique is based on recursion, or repetition. You continuously work through the individual steps and then start again from the beginning. This allows you to check whether there are still any ambiguities or whether you have (at best) already fully understood the topic.
The procedure is as follows:
1. Explain the topic completely
You're probably thinking we're putting the cart before the horse, because how can you explain something you haven't even learned yet? The logic behind this follows in Step 2.
2. Make a note of gaps in knowledge
While you attempt to explain the topic thoroughly to yourself or someone else in the first step, you'll quickly notice that you stumble at some points. This is precisely what the learning method is aimed at. Now you write down the stumbling blocks or gaps in your knowledge, which brings us to step 3.
3. Address the knowledge gaps
Now try to understand everything you wrote down in the second step. Use your books, the internet, ask your professor, or whoever else can help you. The important thing is that all the gaps in your knowledge from step 2 are closed by the end.
4. Re-explain the topic
Once you've completed step 3, you can move on to step 4, which essentially starts you back at step 1. As mentioned at the beginning, the Feynmann method is based on recursion. This repetition involves explaining the topic in full and writing it down again to uncover gaps in your knowledge, which you can then fill in the next step.
So you repeat the whole thing until you can explain the topic with complete confidence.
Only when you get there will you have acquired in-depth knowledge and will no longer have any difficulty recalling your knowledge and solving transfer tasks in the exam.
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