Do you know what the most effective strategies to use are when you want to learn something? It turns out that most people don’t. In fact, many of the popular strategies that people use are not that effective.
This is quite worrying, as according to the numerous studies and surveys done on the future of work, knowing how to learn and the skills associated around this meta-skill, are always ranked at the top of the skills needed in the new types of jobs.
The expert-generalists are gaining in importance and the future will require you to be able to grasp many different subjects quite quickly. You won’t be able to do that if you don’t have the basic learning techniques down.
A recent study led by John Dunlosky of Kent State University looked at the effectiveness of 10 study techniques. The results showed that techniques like distributed practice are the most effective, while popular techniques like highlighting and underlining have only a limited effectiveness.
Here are the 10 methods:
1) Practice testing: taking practice tests on the material
2) Distributed practice: spreading out learning over time
3) Interleaved practice: mixing different problems and materials within a single study session
4) Elaborative interrogation: generating an explanation for why a fact or concept is true
5) Self-explanation: explaining how new information is related to known explanation or explaining steps taken during problem solving
6) Rereading: restudying text material again after an initial reading
7) Highlighting and underlining: marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading
8) Summarization: writing summaries of what you learned
9) Keyword mnemonic: using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials
10) Imagery for text: attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening
I will give a short summary of the findings on each of these methods from the study, as well as some tips on how to implement these strategies and techniques into your own study plans.
John Dunlosky, the chief researcher behind the meta-study, says that all of these techniques can be used successfully by a motivated student:
“All of the strategies that we reviewed can be used successfully by a motivated student who (at most) has access to a pen or pencil, some index cards, and perhaps to a calendar.”
However some strategies are better than others. let’s find out which.
Study method:
What is it?
How effective is it?
What does this mean for your studying?
1) Study method: Practice testing
What is it?
This method involves you taking practice tests in order to learn the material. The idea is for you to set up situations (tests), where you actively force yourself to use your memory to recall the information that you are trying to learn. This doesn’t mean the act of taking a graded test itself, but can instead include a wide variety of techniques that use active recall.
To quote the study:
“For example, practice testing could involve practicing recall of target information via the use of actual or virtual flashcards, completing practice problems or questions included at the end of textbook chapters, or completing practice tests included in the electronic supplemental materials that increasingly accompany textbooks.”
How effective is it?
According to many experiments, practice testing is a good way to enhance retention of things that you learned.
To quote the study:
“Testing improves learning. Since the seminal study by Abbott (1909), more than 100 years of research has yielded several hundred experiments showing that practice testing enhances learning and retention.”
Different studies show that students who engaged in practice tests were able to later recall information much more easily and scored much higher on the final test.
For example, in one study meant to test students learning of the Swahili language, practice testing yielded higher scores for a much larger percentage of the students, than just simple restudying.
To quote the study:
“Performance on a final test 1 week later was substantially greater after continued testing (80%) than after continued study (36%).”
Practice testing has different forms, but the form where you put yourself in situations where you simulate the testing environment, can also help with things like learning how to manage stress better.
A meta-analysis study of different scientific studies on practice testing came up with the conclusion that this method is more effective than the vast majority of other study methods:
“The testing effect is a well-known concept referring to gains in learning and retention that can occur when students take a practice test on studied material before taking a final test on the same material. Research demonstrates that students who take practice tests often outperform students in non-testing learning conditions such as restudying, practice, filler activities, or no presentation of the material.”
The good results of these studies are so systematic that the researchers have even coined the term “testing effect” in order to describe this phenomenon.
The testing effect can be described as the finding that long-term memory is often increased when you do retrieval practice as part of your study sessions.
What does this mean for your studying?
Throughout your studying sessions, you should set some time to doing practice tests. These can be anything ranging from hiding the definitions of words with your right hand and trying to recall them from memory, to doing the practice tests at the end of each chapter, all the way to simulating a testing session itself.
Another thing that you can do is to create your own practice tests. At the end of each study session you write down some questions that you think best reflect the material that you studied and a few days or weeks later, you sit down and try to answer these questions yourself.
Flash cards are an example of practice testing. You can create your own flash cards and then periodically test yourself with them.
Sometimes you can find practice tests for the subject that you are studying online. This can be a good way to test whether you are getting the material.
2) Study method: Distributed practice
What is it?
This means that instead of cramming your studying into one day, you spread it out over a certain period. Usually this involves regular study sessions.
How effective is it?
To quote:
“The term distributed practice effect refers to the finding that distributing learning over time (either within a single study session or across sessions) typically benefits long-term retention more than does massing learning opportunities back-to-back or in relatively close succession.”
Many studies were done in order to test distributive practice and all of them proved that distributed practice has better overall results than massed practice. In order to illustrate this, here are the results of one of the tests:
“Spaced practice (1 day or 30 days) was superior to massed practice (0 days), and the benefit was greater following a longer lag (30 days) than a shorter lag (1 day).”
The result was that this technique is of high utility for the learners.
What does this mean for your studying?
The idea is quite simple. Instead of cramming everything the night before the test, you set up regular slots for studying throughout the week.
You can set up regular study sessions per subject. For example, for subject A, you say that you will study it for one hour every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
This way you spread out your study sessions over some time.
You need to do this systematically. This method is highly effectively and will help you learn material much better than most other methods.
You can combine distributed (spaced) practice with other types of methods, but this should be the skeleton around which you wrap all the other methods, and not something that you do just from time to time.
