What is SOAR, which is called the best study method?
SOAR has been a well-established study method for quite some time. SOAR is a technique born from the idea of elucidating how human memory works and creating a study method that is easy for the human brain to understand things. Roughly speaking, it is one of the learning methods useing of metacognitive system and a way of thinking similar to SQ3R.
There is a certain evaluation about the effect.
In a test of 134 students, half of them were trained in SOAR, and in the "facts, relationships, and concepts test", SOAR grades were higher than those of students who studied normally.
Even in the test comparing SQ3R and SOAR, there are reports that the group using SOAR understood 20% more difficult concepts and 14% more memorized the facts.
Search practice is another well-known useful learning method. However, search practice is not so suitable for understanding difficult concepts (for example, what is the meaning of the chi-square test?). So, if you want to understand complicated concepts deeply, you should make the groundwork with SOAR.
By the way, this review is a compilation of correct usage of SOAR by team of Morningside University. The team says:
Most students don't check their understanding or whether they really know what they need to know. Instead, many students use redundant strategies such as rereading, recopying, and reading aloud to facilitate learning.
In one study, which observed college students studying, most students repeated the ideas they wrote down character by letter (Gubbles, 1999). In another study, nearly 70% of students studied for the test simply by reading back their notes, more than half of whom did it minutes before the test (Bausch and Becker, 2001). (...) However, studies have shown that such redundant learning methods reduce test performance (Anderson, 1995; Craik and Watkins, 1973).
In short, most people are reviewing lazily. And this makes their grades worse rather than better.
Well, what is SOAR? SOAR is an acronym for:
- Select = Extract what you really need from a huge amount of information
- Organize = Arrange selected information in a visually easy-to-understand manner
- Associate = Connect what you already know with new information
- Regulate = Summarize and quiz and tap information into your head
You will often hear each point, but the key point of this SOAR is to do this in order as a series of steps.
By the way, the author team gives some bad examples of what ordinary students are doing at each point.
Select
- Good choice = Select only the information you need and write it out in a notebook
- Bad choice = keep all information in a notebook
Organize
- Good Organize = organize information using graphics
- Bad Organize = just list information or just outline it
Associate
- Good Associate = connect new ideas with old ones
- Bad Associate = Learn new ideas individually
Regulate
- Good Regulate = Check information with tests and summaries
- Bad Regulate = Reread what you wrote in the notebook
Well, I often hear all the points as "examples of bad study methods", but there may still be many people who do this. Because a bad study method basically doesn't burden your cognition, it just evokes the inertia inside you. And since there is no burden on cognition, the results of study will not come out in the end.
4 steps to master SOAR
Let's actually use SOAR! As mentioned above, SOAR consists of 4 steps,
Step 1 Select
The first step is to write down what you learned during reading and lectures in simple bullet points instead of writing in "long sentences". Normally, you can't remember long information no matter how many times you read it back, so just extract important information for the time being. At the "Select" stage, make a lot of things like this simple memo.
Step 2 Organize
Next, summarize the information picked up above. No matter how much you look at the above bullet points, our brain only thinks that "various characters are lined up and it's annoying", so convert it to a format that your brain can feel at ease.
There are many ways to do this, for example, a "mind map" is one way to systematize, but the most major one is to simply tabulate.
Step 3 Associate
Here, connect the disparate information systematized above.
The important thing is to be aware of "associating internal information" (comparing data in newly learned information) and "associating external information" (associating information that you already know with new data).
This is a very important point because the information will not spread if you only care about the internal relationships.
Step 4 Regulate
Finally, based on the work so far, make a quiz for checking information. The idea from here is the same as "search practice". Take a quiz about what you want to remember in the end.
At the end, the point is to put it into search practice. So, the SOAR system is a way of thinking to create search practice from complicated and difficult concepts.
In any case, if you can do these four steps automatically, you should be able to understand any difficult information.
