How to study effectively || Active recall and Spaced repetition
- New Life At Ease
- Jun 25, 2020
- 8 min read
Updated: Jul 13, 2020
We have been studying since we are in school. We learn new things taught in school, we study them at home and give a test every week, every semester or at the end of the year based on what we learn. Not everyone will pass the exam with distinction because everyone has a different technique for studying. Yes, it is true that different people study in different ways but is that like everyone are scoring the same marks. No!, So, here are some study methods (which are ofcourse scientifically proven) which you should not do and which you should do.
Methods you should not follow
What most of us do when we learn a new topic? Yes, we read th textbook after the lesson is taught in the school/college. It's good but what after that? What we do when the exams are close or we want to revise the topic? We highlight , reread or make notes or just summarize the chapter. But these are not very effective methods of studying (again these are evidence based). When you start highlighting, you end up highlighting the complete page and then wonder how much colorful your book is and you are not able to retain in your mind anything. When you reread, you are just reading it again. Yes, sometimes is good to rread as you miss some points but during revision, it is never effective.
You can also never depend on class lectures and notes. They are just for your reference and never for learning effectively. If you want to learn something, you have to understand it deeply and also be able to explain it to somebody else.
Take a look at the quote below, from an engineering student, who just barely managed to pass her Physics 1 course.
“I went to every lecture and felt like I understood all the concepts he was talking about. When I went to do the exams though, I would have no clue what to do and just half-ass it.”
You feel like you’re learning the material, but when you’re on your own with a difficult problem to solve, the material isn’t there for you. You can’t retrieve it. Here’s the problem though, you never really “learned” it in the first place.
Listening to your professor’s logical, organized explanation of a new concept and thinking, “oh ok, got it”
Mindlessly reading through your lecture notes while nodding and murmuring, “makes sense”
Doing problem sets with the textbook open to the example problems, and plugging and chugging until the correct answer pops out
According to study conducted by John Dunlosky, he said that
Summarization and imagery use for text learning have been shown to help some students on some criterion tasks, yet the conditions under which these techniques produce benefits are limited, and much research is still needed to fully explore their overall effectiveness.
We run into this unfortunate situation because we think of ourselves like sponges – we’ll somehow absorb this new (albeit extremely uninteresting) information as it washes over us like a warm bath. As the professor keeps droning on, it’s a battle to stay with it. Your attention drifts. Your brain is shutting down.
This is what we call passive learning.
This does not mean that all these method are not at all benifitial but these are only apllicable for a short run. You can do it for small topics and ease-to-grasp topics. Here is another study from John Dunlosky
The benefits of these techniques do generalize across some variables, yet despite their promise, they fell short of a high utility assessment because the evidence for their efficacy is limited.
Methods you should follow
If rereading, highlighting and summarising aren’t effective methods of revising, then what should we be doing? The two most effective methods that I’ve come across are active recall and spaced repetition which, in combination, will help make your studies more efficient, effective and rewarding.
Active Recall Theory and Evidence
We often think that learning is a process whereby you test yourself after having learnt all the information. Surely it’s counterintuitive to do anything else? In fact, this can't be further from the truth!
Active recall involves retrieving information from memory through, essentially, testing yourself at every stage of the revision process. The very act of retrieving information and data from our brains not only strengthens our ability to retain information but also improves connections in our brains between different concepts.
Research from 2013 which analysed hundreds of separate studies about effective revision techniques, concluded that testing, or active recall, is a technique that has ‘high utility’ and can be implemented effectively with minimal training.
“On the basis of the evidence…we rate practice testing as having high utility. Testing effects have been demonstrated across an impressive range of practice-test formats, kinds of material, learner ages, outcome measures, and retention intervals. Thus, practice testing has broad applicability”.
These studies from 1939 and 2010 provide valuable verification of the effectiveness of active recall but it was a study from 2011 that I found particularly convincing.
In that study, the researchers split students into 4 groups with each student tasked with learning the same material before being tested on what they learnt. However, each group was given different instructions and parameters for learning the content.
The first group would read the material only once.
The second group would read the material four times.
The third group would read the material then were told to make a mind map.
The fourth group would read the material once, then recall as much as possible.
In both the verbatim test – when asked to recall facts – as well as the inference test – when asked to recall concepts – the active recall group significantly outperformed the other groups.
This study shows that testing yourself just once is more effective than rereading a chapter four times. I'm sure we’ve all used rereading at some point but simply through testing yourself once you could drastically improve the efficacy and efficiency of your studies. This is such a simple technique but has such substantial, obvious benefits that we would be foolish to not use it!
Perhaps the reason we don't like to use active recall is that it's more difficult and mentally taxing than rereading. But the key point is revision should be cognitively demanding! It’s useful to think about this in terms of going to the gym – if you’re lifting weights that are light, you’re not going to make much progress but if you’re lifting weights that test your strength, you’re more likely to develop muscle faster. It’s the same with developing the ‘muscle’ of your brain - the harder we have to work to retrieve information, the more effective our brains will become in storing and recalling that information in the future.
Active Recall Strategies
So, how can we apply active recall in our own studies? Are there any strategies that are more effective? Well, first of all, almost anything we do that requires us to use cognitive effort and brain power to retrieve information is going to be helpful. However, more specifically, I used a number of strategies which utilised active recall and below are three approaches that, personally, I’ve found useful.
If you can’t quite break the habit of making notes, one strategy I found particularly helpful was making notes with your book closed. Instead of copying directly out of the textbook, try to learn a topic before writing out how you would explain the key points and key concepts in your own words but with the book closed. Once you’ve written down as much as you can remember, open the book and add the parts you missed.
I repeated this for about two months in the lead up to the exams – combining active recall with spaced repetition – and by the time the exams came round I had a good grasp of over 50 formulas, each with references, which I could then draw upon in the exam.
So it's a simple strategy but if it can work for a high school student, I'm sure you can find a way of making it work for your personal needs too.
Alternative to Making Notes…Ask Questions
Despite evidence showing that note-taking isn’t an effective revision technique, it still feels intuitively productive to write things down, right? I didn’t want to completely stop making notes so I tried to adapt this desire to make notes and began to write questions for myself.
This strategy resembles the ‘Cornell Note-Taking’ method - the process of writing questions for yourself based upon the material in the syllabus. This produces a list of questions with the main idea being that instead of passively rereading or highlighting the information as we’re often tempted to do, we’re forced to actively engage in cognitive effort to retrieve the information to answer the questions which strengthens connections between information in our brains and improves our ability to recall that information in an exam.
In essence, writing questions forces you to engage in cognitive effort and the more brain power it takes to recall a fact, the more mentally taxing your studies are and the more you’re going to gain from the time you put into revision.
Anki is a flashcard app that allows you to create online flashcards which you can use to test yourself in practice sessions. It uses an algorithm built around active recall and spaced repetition and hence learns as you progress through your studies and revision.
Spaced repetetion
Here’s how Pierce J. Howard, the author of my least favorite book to haul into coffee shops – The Owner’s Manual for the Brain – explains it:
“Work involving higher mental functions, such as analysis and synthesis, needs to be spaced out to allow new neural connections to solidify. New learning drives out old learning when insufficient time intervenes.”
Spaced repetition is a technique for efficient memorization which uses repeated review of content following a schedule determined by a spaced repetition algorithm to improve long-term retention.
The forgetting curve is a mathematical formula that describes the rate at which something is forgotten after it is initially learned. The idea is over 100 years old. It originates in the late 19th century, with German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who was among the first scientists to perform experiments to understand how memory works.
Ebbinghaus performed his experiments on himself. He would first memorize lists of meaningless syllables, say these:
DIF, LAJ, LEQ, MUV, WYC, DAL, SEN, KEP, NUDAfter that, he tested himself periodically, to see how many of the nonsense syllables he remembered at various points in time. Ebbinghaus discovered that his memory of them quickly decayed. This phenomenon of learning and promptly forgetting information will be familiar to anyone who has tried to cram the night before an exam.
How to combat it?
Reinforce the training regularly
Ebbinghaus discovered that information is easier to recall when it’s built upon things you already know. Every time you reinforce the training, the rate of decline reduces. The testing effect says that by simply testing a person’s memory, that memory will become stronger. Staging frequent training interventions as part of a learning campaign helps solidify the information through active recall.
Improve Clarity
Make the information easier to absorb in the first place. If you learn something from an essay or an article, it’s easier to forget the meaning or miss it entirely. Try to represent your information in a diagram, or create a video describing the learning objective.
Make it More Relevant
An off-the-shelf learning resource won’t have the same impact as a custom-made one. In every piece of training you produce, never forget the core purpose of your organisation, what we call the Epic Meaning. This works in two ways: the more relevant the training, the is easier it is to recall, and the common focus continually encourages the behaviours that are important to your business.
Make it More Interactive
People learn better when they’re actively involved than when they’re passive observers. If you don’t give your learners an opportunity to interact with the content, they’ll just drift off and lose concentration. Adding elements of gameplay to the learning is a great way to keep the learner involved and they might even enjoy the training!
Evidences and references:-
http://amzn.to/2b8mrPu The Owner’s Manual for the Brain
Study conducted by John Dunlosky https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Dunlosky+J&cauthor_id=26173288
Research from 2013
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning - Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel https://amzn.to/3andfUn
A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) - Barbara Oakley https://amzn.to/39pKNjs
Metacognitive strategies in student learning: do students practise retrieval when they study on their own? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...
Disparate Effects of Repeated Testing: Reconciling Ballard's (1913) and Bartlett's (1932) Results https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1...
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