The SOAR Method

Introduction

What do you do when you open up a textbook to learn or review the material from a particular chapter? Maybe you highlight, make an outline of the chapter, make flashcards, etc. In this post, we're going to look at a specific learning strategy called SOAR - select, organize, associate, regulate. This method is rooted in cognitive research, specifically the work of Mayer (1996), and has been shown to lead to significantly better learning outcomes than other study methods.

Motivation

The SOAR method was developed to address four weak learning strategies that are extremely common. Numerous studies have found that 73% of college students report difficulty preparing for exams (so you're not alone). Here are the four common, inefficient learning strategies:

1. Incomplete note-taking: Note-taking and the review of notes are certainly crucial for learning, but students often omit critical points when taking notes during a lecture or while reading. Considering that one study found that there's just a 5% chance of recalling information that is omitted from notes, we can see why this is a problem.
2. Linear notes: Often, students (most people, in fact) organize information linearly when taking notes - lists and outlines are linear forms of note-taking. Organizing information linearly can restrict learning by ignoring relational information.
3. Piecemeal learning: Imagine trying to determine the end product of a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle by looking at a few individual pieces. So it is when you try to learn individual pieces of information without exploring the connections between different facts and concepts.
4. Redundant strategies: A lot of redundant strategies feel effective but have been shown time and again to do little to aid learning. These include rereading notes, recopying notes verbatim, and highlighting.

Theoretical basis for SOAR

The SOAR method is based on the information processing view of cognition. In this view, learning is understood in terms of the interactions of three types of memory:

1. Sensory Memory
2. Working Memory
3. Long-term Memory

Here's the basic idea. Our sensory memory receives input in the form of external stimuli. This could be words on a page, spoken language (in a lecture), diagrams, etc. Our attention filters out extraneous stimuli (background noise, for example) and takes the stimuli we care about and passes them on to our working memory. Working memory is like RAM in computer. It's our active processing memory and is able to juggle about 5 - 9 pieces of information or processes at once. When you're doing a calculation like 13 x 14 in your head, it's your working memory that you feel working hard trying to hold onto the in-between calculations. Finally, information is encoded and stored into our long-term memory, from which it can be retrieved later.

In summary, our attention passes important sensory information to our working memory. Our working memory actively processes both new input, pulled from sensory memory, and previously learned information, retrieved from our long term memory. New knowledge is encoded and stored in our long-term memory. This might all sound very mechanical, but learning is an active, constructive, organic process. This model just gives us a useful way of conceptualizing the process of learning.

The SOAR Method

The four aspects of the SOAR method correspond to the four information processes listed above:

Select	Attention
Organize	Storage
Associate	Encoding
Regulate	Retrieval

Once you have a sense of what we mean by these four activities, they'll be easy to remember and apply, so let's got through them one at a time.

Select

As we said earlier, good note-taking is crucial for learning, but incomplete note-taking is all too common and can create gaps in our knowledge. Selection is about not only recording the important information from a lecture or book, but recording it completely. In a lecture this can be especially difficult. In addition to sometimes moving too quickly, many professors/teachers also say a lot that they don't write. A fellow researcher conducted a study in which he found that students write less than 10% of what (math) professors say but don't write on the board. This is especially problematic because professors often share a lot of important insights verbally.

Okay, so what do we do with this information?

Well, for one thing, we can try to capture insights that we hear but that aren't written on the board. One way to do so is by just writing a little reminder to ask the professor to repeat the comment after class.

More importantly though, we should attempt to complete our notes after class. Go back through your notes and fill in any gaps so that someone reading your notes could make sense of them. If you're not able to do so on your own, consult a friend's notes, your textbook, Google, or, when available, your professor's lecture notes. This process of engaging with your notes and refining them will help to reinforce the material.

Organize

In our discussion of weak learning strategies, we mentioned linear note-taking. Lists and outlines miss the connections between facts and concepts. In order to incorporate information into our long-term memory, we need to connect it to previously learned information and by organizing (or reorganizing) our notes in non-linear or graphical ways, we can better see and retain those connections. Let's consider a simple example.

Say we're trying to learn information about the planets. Linear notes might look like this:

• Mercury
  • 36 million miles from the sun
  • 3 months revolution time
  • 30 mi/s orbital speed
  • 3000 mi diameter
  • rocky surface
• Venus
  • 67 million miles from the sun
  • 8 months revolution time
  • 22 mi/s orbital speed
  • 8000 mi diameter
  • rocky surface

A non-linear way to record the same information might be to put it all in a table (or a tree diagram):

	Mercury	Venus
Miles from Sun	36 Million	67 Million
Rev. Time	3 months	8 months
Orbital speed	30	22
Diameter (mi)	3000	8000
Surface	Rocky	Rocky

Take your complete notes and come up with ways to transfer the information to a format that captures connections, comparisons, categories, etc.

Here's an example from my own experience. When preparing for our first-year comprehensive exams, my fellow doctoral students and I went through all of our reading notes from the first year and created a huge spreadsheet which we organized by concept, including texts, quotes, page numbers, summaries, etc. The process of putting this all together was immensely helpful in connecting ideas across texts and across courses.

Associate

We learn by incorporating the information being processed in our working memory into schemata (the plural of schema) in our long-term memory. A schema is a conceptual framework, which provides the basis for how we relate new knowledge to existing knowledge. So, what this means absent the jargon is that when dealing with new information, we need to somehow connect it to things we've already learned and stored in our long-term memory.

Once you have your completed notes organized in a non-linear way, you want to make connection to things you already know. In other words, you want to start connecting the puzzle pieces so that the whole picture starts to come together. The more connections you can make the better. You can even connect concepts learned in one class to those learned in another. Ideas from physics can be easily connected to concepts learned in a math class, and any connections you can make are going to improve your ability to recall and apply information.

Regulate

I recently heard someone say that we spend too much time worrying about getting information into our heads when we should be practicing getting information out of our heads. This might not be 100% accurate, but the sentiment is an important one. You get better at recalling and applying information by practicing recalling and applying information. Rather than just using redundant strategies like looking back over your notes or rereading a chapter, you want to practice retrieving information from your long-term memory.

Once you've taken your complete notes, organized them, and made connections to stuff you already know, you have to practice recalling that information. You can do this by giving yourself mini-quizzes while studying, asking a friend to quiz you, or trying to explain a concept to someone without the aid of your notes (something we talked about in another section). Getting things wrong when your self-assessing is probably one of the best ways to remember the right answers and processes. Because our mind has a strong, averse reaction to being wrong, we tend to remember the things we get wrong better once we learn the right answer or way to do things.

In a later section, we'll explore some of the best ways to self-assess when studying, but here are two tips that are especially useful for studying math/science:

1. Interleave problem-types: If you're working on the material from chapter 5 in book, make a short quiz for your self with a few problems from chapter 5 and a few from earlier chapters interspersed between those. It might seem like the best thing to do is to just hammer away at chapter 5 until you know it, but remember, we learn through associating and connecting information; you want to reinforce connections by making your brain work on different types of problems.
2. Space out your practice: Cramming can be useful, but longer-term learning is always best achieved by practicing a little bit at a time, over time. The inner procrastinator in us all resits this, of course, but it's true. Do a little bit at a time and do it regularly.

Summary

Our goal is to get information into our long-term memory in such a way that it is connected to our existing knowledge and can be retrieved and applied when we need it. The SOAR method says that we achieve this by doing four things:

1. Select: Take complete notes. Don't leave things out. If you miss stuff, find out what you missed and fill in the gaps. Don't forget that lots (most?) teachers say a lot that they don't write, so be sure to capture important, but unwritten, insights.
2. Organize: Get in the habit of taking your (complete) notes and organizing them in non-linear ways. You want to draw connections between concepts and facts, make comparisons, etc. I like spreadsheets/tables for this, but you can use mind-maps, flow charts, tree-diagrams, or any visual representation you like.
3. Associate: Take your organized notes and add in connections to stuff you've already learned. We learn through association, so make as many connections as you can.
4. Regulate: Self-assess as much as possible. Quiz yourself before you think you're ready for a quiz. When you do finally get the answers right, they'll stick better. When making mini-quizzes for yourself, interleave example-types, and space out your practice.