Use 'Elaborative Interrogation' to Challenge Yourself While Studying

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When you’re studying, you can try to simply memorize phrases and facts long enough to pass a test, but you should really be trying to retain concepts for the long term. What are you putting all this time and effort (and money) into if it's not preparation for the future? One way you can do that is by using “elaborative interrogation,” a technique that helps you learn more effectively by challenging the facts you’re going over. Even if you do only want to pass a test, this can help you understand how the material's concepts relate to one another, which can help you remember them better ahead of exam day.

What is elaborative interrogation?

Inquiry is an important part of learning, which is why it’s fundamental to some of the best study methods, like SQ3R and KWL. Using those techniques, you outline what you may already know before you start studying, take a quick scan of the material to formulate questions that can guide your reading, then answer your own questions as you go. They're great techniques for making sure you stay engaged and curious, both of which help you focus and actually learn.

With inquiry in general, not only do you have to memorize what’s presented to you, but you have to dig in and understand it by asking questions. Like I said, when employing SQ3R or KWL, you ask questions before you start reading, so you can find the answers. When you try elaborative interrogation, you ask the questions as you go.

Asking questions helps you find answers and establish connections that aren’t immediately apparent in the text, letting you more thoroughly understand what you’re going over. This concept makes sense: When your friend is telling you a wild story, you ask follow-up questions, right? When you ask questions, you're automatically more involved in the process of receiving information and you remember what you take in better because you're getting answers to the parts you were curious about.

How to study with elaborative interrogation

To make this work for you, you need to assess the facts of your material. Say you’re studying accounting. One fact you’ll learn is that you journalize debits before credits. You can get by and do well enough on tests just by knowing that fact without thinking any deeper about it—but if you really want to understand the material, it would be helpful to figure out why you journalize debits before credits. When doing elaborative interrogation, you ask yourself these kinds of questions after looking at your facts, so you fully grasp the meaning of it all. Here, your elaborative interrogation is, “Why do we journalize debits before we journalize credits?” Your next question can be, “Why do we record debits as a positive number?” The reason it’s done this way is to reflect incoming money more easily on the credit side.

You can even go deeper by working backwards: Why do accountants journalize? What do accountants journalize? Who sees the accountant's journal? What is included in an accountant's journal entry? What are debits? What are credits? Why are they journalized? When are they journalized? The more you understand about the core concept, the more questions you can ask, and the more you can grasp the primary fact, which is that you journalize debits before credits. Eventually, the reasoning for why debits are journalized before credits will be so obvious that the fact itself will be more than obvious. Of course that's the order you do it in, and if that order is all you need to know for your test, you're golden.

So, start by identifying the basic facts you need to know. You can do this easily by writing them down as you go through your text, notes, or lecture. Any assertion or basic fact makes the cut. You can also try using AI, like Google's NotebookLM or ChatGPT, to generate facts. As a test, I just asked ChatGPT, “What are some basic facts to study for accounting?” It gave me 16, almost all of which are great for elaborative interrogation. For instance, the software told me that the International Financial Reporting Standards are used in many countries for financial reporting. That’s probably an answer to a question on a test on its own, but to really understand the point of it all, I could ask, “Why do countries need a set of accounting standards? Which countries use the IFRS?”

If you're using ChatGPT or similar, just make sure it’s giving you actual facts; look them up to be sure they’re true. Better yet, use the other tool I mentioned, NotebookLM, because it pulls only from material you provide. Upload your course materials—slide decks, chapter scans, handouts from the professor, whatever—and ask it to pull out the key facts. You can also use the software to generate flashcards, quizzes, mind maps, and informational podcasts, but those are for different study approaches entirely. (Try them out when you're done elaborately interrogating!)

On a separate paper, write down these questions about your facts, then set to work investigating the answers. The answers may come from materials outside your class lecture, notes, or texts, so don’t be afraid to dig deep. For the most part, though, do try to stick with what you've been provided unless the professor has instructed you to look elsewhere on your own. Ultimately, getting the answers to these questions will help you establish the connections you need to truly grasp the material and remember it well.

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