Why Most Study Techniques Fail: Evidence-Based Methods That Actually Work for Exam Retention
Stanford research reveals why highlighting and rereading fail while active retrieval and spaced repetition deliver 50% better exam scores. Learn the evidence-based study methods that medical students and top performers actually use to retain...
As I wrote about earlier, there’s a big difference between how students study and how students learn. And to really drive home this difference, I wanted to share a personal anecdote with all of you. As many of you know, I’m a Stanford psychology student, and last quarter I tried my hand at studying for organic chemistry the “traditional” way. I spent a total of 40 hours highlighting and reviewing my notes for our final, but in the end, I got a D+. Yeah, it was pretty brutal. But here’s the thing: my roommate, who spent somewhere in the neighborhood of half as much time studying (maybe 15-20 hours?), got an A- using what I can only describe as mostly retrieval practice. Now, I know what you’re thinking: did she just get lucky? But trust me, she didn’t. The difference between her performance and mine had everything to do with the methods that we used to study, and almost nothing to do with how hard we worked or how smart we were.
Many students spend a large amount of time studying for their classes and exams, but as they can often get little to no return for their time, many study methods can be considered a “waste of time.” By looking at many common study methods that are used by many students, and analyzing why they work for some, but fail for others, you can determine whether or not a certain method will work for you. There are many common study methods, including highlighting, making flashcards, summarizing, organizing, practicing, teaching, and making mnemonic devices. Although these methods can work in certain situations, the method of retrieval practice has the most solid scientific support. By implementing this method in your own studying, you can ensure that you are getting the most out of your studying, and do as well as or better than your classmates on exams.
The Fluency Trap: Why Familiarity Doesn’t Equal Learning
A 2008 study by Jeffrey Karpicke, published in Science magazine, looked at a group of 60 college students who were studying for a test on Swahili vocabulary. Throughout the study period the students studied until they were able to recall each word once. The key point for the students was to then drop the words they had mastered from further study. What the students failed to understand was that as long as they continued to test themselves on all of the words they had studied for the test, their performance would increase dramatically, in fact by as much as 80% over those who had stopped studying the words they had mastered.
When you read something until it looks familiar, your brain doesn’t know the difference between that and actual knowledge. This feeling of familiarity, in fact, is an illusion of knowledge that has actually been shown to decrease learning when given priority in a study system. We call this a “fluency illusion.” Rereading information, highlighting passages in bright colors, or making elaborate study guides, for example, may feel productive and make you feel sure that you are ready for a test, but, in reality, they are mostly waste of time if they don’t increase retention.
Highlighting is another of the common study tactics that have little to no utility in terms of increasing long-term retention of material. This is because it requires very little cognitive effort to highlight sections of text and many students use highlighting as a way to engage in studying while actually watching TV or listening to music. This type of activity only provides the illusion of being productive while actually wasting a lot of time.
Active Retrieval: The Method Medical Students Actually Use
For all of these reasons, I’m a huge fan of active recall. Unlike passive review of material that we’ve already studied, active recall actually simulates the conditions of a test or a classroom. Thus, it promotes the kinds of connections between different pieces of information, as well as a much deeper understanding of the material as a whole, that are necessary in order to perform well on academic evaluations. Indeed, as Henry Roediger and Maria Schmidt put it in their excellent article on active recall, even attempts to retrieve information that fail to actually produce the correct information can be extremely effective for promoting subsequent learning, because they give students a sense of just how hard it is to recall information of this sort, and thus of just how much they really need to study in order to master it. To put it bluntly, passive review of study materials is a far less effective use of study time than active recall. And so, unless you have some other reason for believing that your passive review is doing you a lot of good, I would recommend sticking with the boring old retrieval practice, rather than taking the much easier route of simply re-reading your notes. And let me tell you, personally, I know from experience that it is well worth it.
First, there’s a lot of research to support the effectiveness of SPRT. For example, Henry Roediger at Washington University in St. Louis found that students who took practice tests for their classes scored 50% higher on final exams than their classmates who spent an equivalent amount of time studying for the same tests. In fact, the researchers found that even the retrieval attempts that didn’t succeed in bringing the correct information to the student’s mind helped the student learn the information for future tests. In other words, your brain learns a lot more from your attempts to retrieve information from memory than from simply reading the information over and over again and hoping that it will sink in.
Put this into practice, not just read about it. Study without your notes in front of you. The best way to study is to write down everything that you can remember from a lecture and then compare your notes to what the professor wrote up. This will help you to pinpoint where you got lost. Apps such as Anki (free) and RemNote (free for students) are perfect for creating physical flashcards, also known as digital index cards. These have spaced repetition built into them. The big universities such as The University of Texas system give students thousands of dollars worth of physical flashcards for free and distribute them in the campus bookstores. Digital flashcards are not the only way to study effectively.
Spaced Repetition: Why Cramming Guarantees Forgetting
The Forgetting Curve is a concept developed by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885 that describes how people tend to lose large amounts of information over time, with 50-80% of new information being lost after 24 hours. It is one of the primary reasons that people engage in cramming, a study technique that involves a massive amount of information being stored in short-term memory with the intention of being retrieved on a test. This information is naturally lost after the test because the brain assumes that the information was only meant to be used once and is therefore not worth keeping.
“Mass practice leads to fast learning and fast forgetting. Spaced practice leads to slower initial learning but dramatically improved long-term retention.” – Cognitive Psychology Journal, 2019.
A major component of the study method that we have come to associate with great amounts of learning is that of the spacing of practice attempts over extended periods of time. Ebbinghaus referred to the curve that was found to describe the amount of time that it would take for people to once again be able to recall information that they had previously learned as the “forgetting curve”. A simple description of this curve is that of 50-80% of information learned being forgotten within a 24 hour time frame. By spreading out practice attempts over long periods of time, information that has been learned is given the signal that it is important to remember for long periods of time. Retrieval attempts made in the days following an initial study session of material should be attempted to be recalled as long as possible before again reviewing material for additional study. The amount of time that information is able to be held in long term memory before requiring additional review will increase dramatically after each successful attempt at retrieval. It is worth noting that this is the exact method that the language learning app Duolingo uses for their daily practice sessions. Duolingo has reached 500 million users in a relatively short period of time for a number of reasons, including the fact that the study method that they are utilizing is sound and consistently proven to be effective in helping people to learn information.
Interleaving Beats Blocking
A very common way for people to study is to divide up their work into a number of blocks. For example, someone studying calculus may do 90 minutes of studying per night for 3 hours, and then move on to work on biology for 3 hours the next night, and then go back to work on history for 3 hours the night after that. All of this work is done within a single subject, or study “area”. This style of study, within a single subject, or study “area”, can make the work feel very organized, but within each 90 minute block, there is only a single task, or set of tasks, being studied. Because of this, a student studying in this fashion often quickly moves from being unable to complete problems within a study area to being able to complete problems within that area very quickly. The problem, for many students, is that even though they are able to solve the problems within a particular study area very quickly, the act of taking an exam is to take problems one at a time, and test a student on a wide variety of different topics, not within a 15 problem set, but one problem at a time.
In my last study attempt, I tested this method of mixed studying and it saved me a lot of time and was very effective for me.
Instead of spending your time to solve problems of the same type in a row, you intermingle problems of different types. For example, you first solve a derivative problem, then a limit problem, then an integral problem, and then go back to solving derivative problems. This forces you to set up for each problem which procedures you need to apply to solve it, which is exactly what you do on exams. As the authors of a 2010 study in Applied Cognitive Psychology found, in a test administered one week after the study’s participants had undergone training in which they had used either the blocked or the interleaved method, the participants who had used the interleaved method scored 43% higher than the participants who had used the blocked method.
The Feynman Technique: Teaching Forces Understanding
Richard Feynman is one of the Nobel Prize winning physicists and he is known for this simple study technique. He called it The Feynman Technique. First pick a concept that you have been studying. Then explain it to a student as if you were teaching a middle schooler. Any time you need to use jargon or get “stuck” that means you found a “hole” in your knowledge of that concept. Go back and read through the part of your book where that concept was explained and continue to teach it to a student, again as if you were teaching it to a middle schooler, until you can explain the entire concept without the use of any notes or in simple terms.
Teaching someone material means that you truly understand that material – you can explain even the hardest concept in a simple manner to an elementary school student. Use this to your advantage when attempting to identify the knowledge gaps in your own studies. Highlights do not adequately show the extent of your confusion or understanding, but asking a confused student (even if that student is you several months in the future) for follow-up information will reveal where your studies have been lacking.
Study in groups of 4-5, take turns teaching the material of different parts of the study material. In the end, each student has studied less, but learned more. Students teaching other students learn more than students listening to other students. A great way to set up study groups is to use free Discord servers or WhatsApp groups. This way, no one has to pay for any study group software. The University of Michigan engineering school did a 2022 study of how students studied and found that the students who studied in groups scored 15-20% higher on their tests than the students who studied alone for the same amount of time.
Sources and References
Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). “The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning.” Science, 319(5865), 966-968. Dunlosky, J., et al. ( 2013). ” Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. Rohrer, D., & Taylor, K. (2007). The Shuffling of Mathematics Problems Improves Learning. Instructional Science, 35(6), 481-498. Bjork, R. A. (1994). “Memory and Metamemory Considerations in the Training of Human Beings.” Metacognition: Knowing about Knowing, MIT Press.
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