If you are struggling to find ways to study for your firefighter promotional exam while working on your firefighter promotional exam prep, try explaining the material to someone as if they were six years old. As weird as it seems, it’s a great way to study and test your comprehension.
Test of Your Own Comprehension
There is a famous quote by Albert Einstein, “if you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” If you can explain the material to someone simply, as if they were a child, that means you understand it and have mastered the material. It means you aren’t just repeating the material as you read and memorize it, you are putting it into your own words because you fully understand it. A lot of people go into exams just knowing the material as they saw it in the textbooks or practice tests only, because they just memorize it as they see it, they don’t truly learn it and understand it. Reframing the material in a way that is so simple a small child could understand actually improves your memory of the material all while testing your own knowledge. Memory improves because you have to actively engage with the material to be able to explain it in this way because it is a form of active recall with the addition of rewording. This leads to deeper understanding and comprehension overall, increasing memory, retention, and application. As a future fire fighter looking to promote, you need to actually understand the material and be able to articulate it, not just be able to repeat it blindly as it is in the textbooks, because you will use it in the future on the job in many different ways. Being able to do this also is an indication that you have mastered the material and are ready for your exam.
Additional Questions
When you do your explanation to your friend, family member or six year old I would also encourage them to ask questions as a six year old would. If you know a small child, then you know they come up with some random questions you likely wouldn’t expect, which is a great way to additionally test your knowledge in a new way. Even if you aren’t really explaining the material to a six year old, explaining to someone who has no understanding of the subject also gives them the opportunity to come up with questions for you that people who know the material might not have. Some of the questions might not be critical to the exam you are going to take, but it forces you to dig deeper into the material and get a better understanding which matters on the job.
Build Community
Using this study method, you could do it alone in a mirror, but it is best to do it with a real person for a few reasons. One being their ability to ask questions as stated above, but also to help build your community within the fire service. This is an opportunity to work with other people who are also studying for their own promotional exam. It gives you an opportunity to study yourself but also help someone else in the same way. If you want to move up the ranks in the fire service, having connections with other fire fighters in every stage of their careers can be very important to you in the long run. So seeking higher ranking officers to study with as well as lower ranking officers who may be interested in the promotion process to mentor is a great way to start building that community.
Speaking It Increases Memory
Another benefit of explaining the material to someone as if they were a six year old is the fact that you are saying the material out loud. Saying and hearing the material simultaneously is a great way to improve memory of said material. This is because of the production effect, which is “the dual action of speaking and hearing oneself that has the most beneficial impact on memory.” Saying the words out loud makes your studying active versus reading which is just passive. That, in turn, makes the words you are saying “more memorable.”
The Takeaway
Whether you have a six year old child or a family member you can share your knowledge of your firefighter promotional exam material with, or even a friend who can pretend to be a child, silly as it seems, give it a try. This method of studying is so effective because it is an active way of studying that forces you to reword the material in a way anyone can understand and therefore forces you to understand it better yourself and increase your own memory of it all, all the while building community and ultimately determining if you have truly mastered the material or not.