Justin Sung — Intelligent People Never Use Highlighters. Here’s Why
Source: YouTube Channel: Justin Sung (2130000 subs) Duration: 18:13 Views: 144435 · Likes: 6037 Video: Watch on YouTube
Join my Learning Drops newsletter (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/newsletter-onlywayhighlighter In this video, I explain why highlighting is a waste of time, backed by research and teach you the only way to use a highlighter effectively by bolting on a strategy that forces deeper thinking.
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= About Dr Justin Sung = Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, a certified teacher, a research author, and a former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.
Key Insights
I’ve wasted hundreds of hours of my life. Time that I will never get back just highlighting things. These are my notes from medical school. Look at this. Just pages and pages of endless highlighting. And I am so glad that I realized how useless this thing is before I graduated and became a working professional. Because as a learning coach, when I go out and do workshops with business owners and accountants and engineers, I see that they are still wasting time trying to learn by highlighting. But there is really only one way to use a highlighter for learning that is not a complete waste of time. Only one. And in my nearly 15 years of coaching across thousands of people, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone use a highlighter in that way. So in this video, I’m going to explain why you should probably just throw your highlighter away. But if you want to keep it, how you need to change the way that you use it. Now, first of all, you need to understand that highlighters were never invented for learning. Highlighters were invented by this guy called Francis J. Hon in 1963 by accident as he was trying to create a non-permanent marker for his children. And when he sold it, it was marketed as a design tool to emphasize important words in sales copy, like the word refund or free sample. This is before digital advertising, so everything was still on paper. By the 1970s, using a highlighter became the go-to method for emphasizing things that are important. And it sort of just trickled its way into people using it for learning, too. But what you have to understand is that using a highlighter is less effective for learning than watching paint dry. And I mean that literally. There was a meta-analysis that looked at a bunch of different learning methods. And one of the methods was something called wakeful rest. Wakeful rest means basically just doing nothing while being awake. So, one of the studies actually had participants stare at a wall for 10 minutes. They would learn something new and then stare at a wall. And wakeful rest had a small to moderate positive effect. The idea is that after you learn something, when you just let your brain kind of just do nothing, it just replays and strengthens those new connections. And they found that just staring at a wall produced a Hedges G value of 0.448. So, for reference, a effect size of 0.2 would be considered small, and then up to 0.5 is considered medium, and then 0.8 is considered a large effect. On the other hand, highlighting produces an effect size of essentially zero. So, when I say that highlighting is useless, I really mean [music] it. There’s not many things that you can do that is more useless than just highlighting as you learn. Because you can just do literally nothing, and it would be [music] better than highlighting. And yet, across the last 20 years of surveys, almost every single major survey has found that highlighting is one of the most common learning methods that are used by people all across the world. Depending on the study, between 50 to 80% of people use highlighting as one of their go-to learning methods. And we’re not just talking about students, either. As a learning coach, where I work with both students and professionals, I find that most professionals have the same learning habits that they developed during the school years. They just carry those same methods forward, and basically have the exact same problems in just different contexts. In fact, the problem with highlighting for working professionals is actually even worse than for students, for reasons that I’ll explain later in the video. But, why is it so bad? [music] And if it’s really that bad, why is it so common? If I told people that a great learning method is to slap yourself in the face every time you read something, people would stop doing that because they would realize it hurts and isn’t effective. So, then why, with 50 years of research telling us that highlighting is a waste of time, do we still do it?
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