by Paul Penn
A word from CTL: What are some study methods that you use often? Cramming and reading the text over and over are some very common ones that though many students know aren’t the “best”, seem to work in a pinch. But do they really? This article will dive into what actually happens when you cram, and recommends some alternative, healthier study habits.
Do my study methods really work?
Research from psychology indicates that our ability to accurately monitor and evaluate our level of knowledge or skill (referred to as metacognitive ability) is often flawed. These flaws tend to give us an inflated perception of our knowledge and understanding, encouraging us to persevere with ineffective methods of studying that quietly, but persistently, undermine our efforts to learn. It’s easy to demonstrate this by examining some preferred study practices and considering the misconceptions about learning that they reflect. Let’s kick off things by looking at that perennial favourite: cramming.
We’ve probably all done it at some point. The evening before the big exam, source materials sprawled out on the desk, a stockpile of energy drinks substituting for the intravenous caffeine line that would be so much more efficient. Productivity is the order of the day, after all; it’s cramming time. Sure enough, research confirms that cramming is a go-to strategy for many students.
However, since the late 19th century, research in psychology has demonstrated that distributing your study time over a number of shorter sessions works better than cramming all the work into one marathon session. This is known as ‘the spacing effect’. It’s one of those rare findings in psychology that goes pretty much uncontested, which makes it even more perplexing that more of us don’t take advantage of it.
Another routine approach to study is to repeatedly reread sources. It’s not difficult to explain why students rely on this approach. If you read a piece of text repeatedly, that text will start to feel familiar. You will likely interpret this feeling of familiarity as progress. Unfortunately, this perception of progress is often illusory. It reflects a failure to consider a vital difference between study and exam conditions: things always seem easy when you have the answers in front of you. Inconveniently, most exams don’t allow you that luxury.
We often view memory as being akin to a somewhat unreliable camera. This reproductive notion of memory lulls us into thinking that successfully remembering a source boils down to the amount of exposure we give it. However, our memory doesn’t passively reproduce a source: it actively reconstructs it according to our previous knowledge, experience and expectations. Using our memory effectively is less about maximising exposure to a new source than figuring out how to use our prior knowledge, experience and expectation filters to integrate that source with what we already know.
So what can I try?
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, examples, 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
Earlier, 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 people often study 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
