Effective studying techniques

  October 18, 2017, 5:11 am

By Tiffany Lloyd

Students hear it all the time. "Study the notes." "Look over your homework again." "Did you study?" But do students really know how to study effectively?

My answer, from my own teaching experience, is no. Some of the fault lies with us teachers. We need to do a better job teaching students how to study rather than assuming students intuitively know how to. The thing is, the most effective study strategies are not intuitive. What FEELS like the best practices actually AREN'T the best practices when it comes to mastering material.

Surveys show that the vast majority of students at all levels (including college) lean on re-reading and repetition as their preferred study strategies. These strategies work well for very easy tests, but for particularly challenging tests -- think AP tests or the ACT -- they simply don't work. Fortunately, research evidence tells us what does work.

Three fantastic books that summarize this research are Make It Stick, Brain Rules, and Drive. They describe the following four techniques that are proven to increase retention and mastery of a subject.

1. Recall: Instead of looking up information, first try to retrieve the knowledge or skill from memory. Studies show that the more cognitive effort expended to learn material, the better a person will be able to remember and retain the information in the future. To help someone study effectively, ask the person what was taught and have the person tell you as much as he or she can before pulling out the notes.

2. Repeated Retrieval: This is very similar to Recall, except instead of recalling once, recall several times, spaced out, before the evaluation is given. Note that this technique is not the same as re-reading. Cognitive effort, the strain we feel in our brains when something is hard, is key to ensuring that the information remains in our heads. Try to make the first recall practice as close as possible to when the information was first taught. Then spread out practices before the evaluation. Avoid cramming as much as possible. Students who cram may score better on a test, but they have a harder time recalling the information in the future. Using flashcards can be a very useful tool for Repeated Retrieval as long as the flashcards force memory retrieval and aren't merely read.

3. Testing: Work either with another person who knows the material or with the teacher and have them test you on the concepts being learned. The questions give you the opportunity to retrieve information, improving your memory of the material. At the same time, the test giver can evaluate mastery and help correct misconceptions. Write down questions that were missed and focus on that material.

4. Teaching: The ultimate test to determine if a person knows the material is if they can teach it correctly to someone else. Teaching the material is the hardest of all these techniques because it requires the most cognitive effort. Not only do you need to recall information, but you also need to be able to put the information into your own words and then think how to present that same information to someone else. Some students will teach the material to their younger siblings. Some will teach to their friends or to their parents. Every student that I've seen do this scores high on quizzes and tests.

These four techniques work far better than re-reading and repetition, which both fail to help students identify their weaknesses and merely provide an "illusion of mastery," as Make it Stick argues. Effective study takes real effort, but the effort is worth it.