How to Study Effectively by Paul Penn (Aeon)

 

Space out your study sessions

As noted above, it’s better to distribute the time you have available to study over a greater number of shorter sessions than it is to cram your studying into a single marathon session. In thinking about exploiting this ‘spacing effect’ in your own studying, you might wonder whether there is an optimal method of spacing out your study sessions. Is there an ideal number of sessions? Is there an optimal interval between sessions?

The good news is that simple guidelines on scheduling your study sessions are sufficient. In terms of the number of sessions you use, too few is more of a problem than too many. If you have 12 hours to dedicate to a topic, it’s better to study over six two-hour-long sessions than it is to study over a couple of six-hour-long sessions. In terms of the length of intervals between your sessions, research indicates that longer intervals tend to be associated (up to a point) with better retention. However, since studying often takes place in a limited timeframe, you should prioritise the number of sessions over getting the longest possible inter-session intervals.

Alternate between studying similar topics

We often believe that it’s best to ‘block’ topics when studying – to allocate a period of time for one topic, and to conclude a review of it before moving on to the next one. However, contemporary research has consistently indicated that alternating between different topics (referred to as ‘interleaving’) can be more effective, especially for topics that are similar in nature and might otherwise be easily conflated.

As an example, if you were learning about psychoactive drugs (for a friend, of course), you’d probably want to look at different classes of drugs: eg, stimulants, depressants and hallucinogens. Broadly speaking, you could deal with these topics in one of two ways: blocking or interleaving. The blocking approach would involve studying each class of drug sequentially; you would conclude your review of stimulants in their entirety before moving on to depressants and then hallucinogens. Alternatively, you could interleave the classes of drugs by organising your studying around categories of information within them. For example, their definitions, exemplars, mechanism of action and profile of psychological effects. Interleaving would involve first looking at a definition for each class of drug, before moving on to an example from each class, followed by their respective mechanisms of action, and then finally their profiles of psychological effects.

Here’s a general rule of thumb you can follow in figuring out whether it might be better to block or interleave your study efforts. Research indicates that interleaving seems to bias your attention towards looking for differences between topics. Therefore, it’s most effective when you’re studying topics that are similar (and require more effort to distinguish from each other). It’s also effective under conditions where you have discretion about assigning information to a category, as might be the case if you were classifying works of art. In contrast, blocking seems to focus your attention on looking for similarities between topics. Therefore, it’s best used for topics that can be easily distinguished and/or when category membership has been predetermined, such as would be the case if you were learning about elements of the periodic table.

Focus on constructing your own understanding of a topic, not reproducing someone else’s

In the ‘Need to Know’ section above, we noted that memory is fundamentally reconstructive, as opposed to reproductive, in nature. If you rely on passively rereading your course materials, you’ll tend to end up using your memory to try to reproduce the author’s understanding of the subject rather than generating your own. So, what is the best catalyst for generating your own understanding of what you read? The answer is to question what you read as you’re reading it. By responding to your own questions, you are forcing yourself to think about how to explain the subject matter in your own words and with reference to your previous knowledge and experience.

You can use an approach called elaborative interrogation to systematically incorporate the process of questioning into your reading. This technique involves annotating your sources with questions that require an explanatory response from you. You can provide this response verbally, initially using your sources for assistance. Do this iteratively with the aim of eventually not needing to consult your sources at all during the process of responding to your questions.

In using elaborative interrogation, try to focus on explanation as much as you can; your aim is to make the information as meaningful to you as possible. Phrasing your questions so they begin with ‘why’ or ‘how’ will help you do this, as will thinking about concrete examples of more abstract concepts. For example, you might annotate this section with the question: ‘Why is responding to your own questions conducive to the reconstructive nature of memory?’

Make retrieval practice an integral part of your studying

Given that the purpose of studying is to prepare for an exam of some kind, it’s ironic that we tend to favour approaches such as rereading over testing our ability to retrieve information from memory (retrieval practice). Testing is not just a way of measuring learning; it can also be a powerful mechanism of learning. This is another one of those findings in psychology that is so robust as to now be considered axiomatic. It’s referred to as the testing effect.

Contrary to how it might feel, both success and failure to retrieve information are helpful for your memory. Both outcomes serve to calibrate confidence in your perception of your knowledge. This is invaluable information in orienting your studying so that it is based on evidence of progress rather than guesswork! When studying, it’s not what you think you know that matters, but rather what you can prove you know. Strange, isn’t it? You probably always thought of tests as your nemesis and studiously tried to avoid them. Yet that whole time, you could have used them as a tool of learning.

You should not make the mistake of dismissing retrieval practice as a cynical exercise in ‘learning to a test’. Its usefulness is not limited to scenarios where you know what questions will be featured in a forthcoming exam. Nor does its effectiveness depend upon congruence between the content or format of your retrieval practice and the exam you eventually take. Furthermore, the benefits of retrieval practice are not simply limited to facts; they also extend to concepts and the transfer of knowledge from one domain to another.

You can incorporate retrieval practice organically into your studying by using the read, recite, review (3R) approach. This involves reading a short passage of text, putting the source to one side and trying to recall the information in your own words, before checking your recall against the source for factual accuracy. You repeat these steps until you are satisfied with your ability to capture the meaning (not words) of the source material in question. If you type out your attempts to recite information from your sources rather than just verbally recall them, you’ll be organically producing notes that capture your understanding of the material.

Don’t just highlight material, think about it

By this point you will have gathered that interaction with your sources is important in studying effectively, but you should know that not all types of interaction are created equal. For example, highlighting text is a method that’s widely used by students. Ostensibly, this seems like a perfectly sensible thing to do when studying. Explicitly identifying the most important parts of a source should help focus your attention by filtering out less relevant material and reducing the burden on your memory.

However, the literature on the effectiveness of highlighting makes for unhappy reading, especially if you own a stationery shop. On the rare occasions where a study has shown highlighting to have a positive effect on learning, it’s not been the act of highlighting per se that is behind the effect. Rather, it’s the thinking behind what is being highlighted – why the highlighted information is significant – that counts. Indeed, research indicates that the people who report using highlighting most frequently tend to do it the least effectively and get the least benefit from its use. I know it’s nice to think that a highlighter works like an optical scanner with a direct connection to your long-term memory, but it is no substitute for mentally engaging with the text.

 

Key points

• You can’t rely on intuition about how well your studying practices are working for you. Intuitive judgments of learning are often inaccurate and tend to produce an inflated perception of progress.
• Avoid defaulting to habitual, passive approaches to studying such as rereading and highlighting sources. These do not take advantage of the reconstructive nature of memory, and make it more tedious and less effective.
• Systematic engagement with the meaning of your source material is the key to successful studying.
• Rather than cramming your studying into an extended session before the exam, it’s much more effective to distribute the time you have available for studying over a larger number of shorter sessions.
• When you are studying similar topics that might be easily confused, it’s a good idea to interleave your studying – to alternate between the topics during your study sessions. This can help you identify the differences between the topics and reduce the chances of them being conflated.
• You should view self-testing as an integral part of your studying. One way to do this is the read, recite and review (3R) method: read a section of text, set it aside as you try to recall its content in your own words, and then check your recall, repeating as necessary. 

-AEON

Paul Penn is a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of East London. He is the author of The Psychology of Effective Studying: How to Succeed in Your Degree (2019) and the winner of the 2021 UK Higher Education Psychology Teacher of the Year award.