How to study for a test (and what doesn’t work as well) – 01/29/2023 – Education

It’s not uncommon for students to get frustrated when they don’t get good grades even though they’ve studied hard for a test. There are also those who feel that they quickly forget what they learned just a few weeks earlier.

These are particularly big challenges for students who have just arrived at the university, who are faced with much more voluminous and complex content than that at school and, often, have to reconcile their studies with work.

“There are students who make tremendous efforts, but in the wrong way and accumulate a lot of superficial or declaratory knowledge, without being able to reach a more conceptual level”, says to BBC News Brasil Matthew Bernacki, associate professor at the School of Education at UNC (University of Carolina do Norte) in Chapel Hill (USA).

Bernacki is dedicated to the science of learning, which in practice translates into helping students get the most out of the time and effort invested in studying. He explains which techniques have proven to be more or less efficient, according to his own scientific research and that of other scientists in the area.

Here are common techniques that he and his colleagues at UNC find ineffective — and how to replace them in practice.

What is usually ineffective: rereading and underlining

Although reading and underlining texts are an important part of learning, they are not usually enough for the student to gain mastery of the studied content. Rereading, in particular, requires effort and time that doesn’t always pay off, because “it gives a false sense of familiarity with the content.” “Once you get out of the text, you can’t reproduce what you’ve read,” says Bernacki.

“As for underlining, there is mixed evidence: if you use (the technique) as an intentional process, reflect on what you are highlighting in the text, take notes and use them to advance your (study) strategy, it can be very productive. “, says the researcher.

“But if you underline it for no particular purpose or just to keep an eye on the text, you may get less benefit.”

Replace with: ‘active learning’

The UNC Learning Center sees reading as a step before learning. To actually learn the content, it is most effective to actively interact with it. Here are some ideas from the center for doing just that:

– Create questions, problems or “quizzes” to answer yourself. It’s what Bernacki calls the “practice of reacquisition” of content;

– By testing yourself, you increase your ability to retain the content studied, explains the researcher;

– Explain the content to yourself, out loud, in your own words;

– For technical content, such as mathematics, it is worth detailing the problem and the steps to solve it.

What tends to be ineffective: studying at the last minute

Spending the day before the test studying is a common practice to try to do well. But the effort usually serves to do well only on that test and not to actually memorize the content.

“We tend to coalesce the entire study into a very small range, which may work right away, but not for long-term use,” explains Bernacki.

Replace with: short, spaced study sessions

Instead of studying several hours just on the eve of the test, it is more worthwhile to do short study sessions, but spaced over several days, of the content you want to learn.

“The important thing is how you use your study time, not the length of your study time,” says the Learning Center. “Long sessions lead to a loss of concentration and, consequently, less learning and retention.”

In practice, you’ll probably study for the same amount of time (or less) as if you left everything until the day before. The advantage is that it will give the brain time to strengthen the neural connections of that learning, which will have a better chance of becoming a long-term memory.

What tends to be ineffective: ‘multitasking’

There are already multiple studies indicating that studying with distractions —for example, WhatsApp messages or videos on TikTok— is inefficient not only because you are dividing your attention, but because the very act of changing screens or devices wastes time and energy.

Replace with: ‘pomodoro’ technique or block study

Bernacki’s recommendation for not suffering from distractions is to establish study blocks. For example, mark 35 minutes on the clock and, during that period, dedicate yourself exclusively to studying content, disconnecting from all distractions.

After that, you have five minutes to reward your brain with some distraction — for example, having a snack or checking your messages. And then you go back for another 35-minute block of study.

This method is known as a “pomodoro” in reference to those tomato-shaped timers. This technique helps not only to avoid wasted time with distraction, but also to keep the brain motivated with the prospect of the “reward”.

(Read more about this and other learning techniques here)

‘Self-regulation’ in studies

Bernacki points out, however, that it is not enough to apply the above techniques as if they were magic formulas that work at all times, but rather to identify which techniques best suit each learning objective. This goes through what the specialist calls self-regulation in studies.

“It’s about analyzing the task, understanding what the learning objective is, what resources I have available, and choosing the strategy that matches that”, he explains.

“Sometimes knowledge is very concrete and explicit—for example, a fact, a definition, a formula, which can be studied more briefly. But other things are more complex, have multiple steps, or require a more conceptual understanding. They are more difficult to study all at once. So you need to generate your own knowledge and your own answers and self-assess: ‘How well did I understand this?’.”

Bernacki has applied these techniques and monitored their results mainly among groups of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students and also first-generation university students, that is, young people who are the first in their families to enter at university—who tend to have a smaller repertoire of study techniques to navigate this challenging period.

In a study published in 2022 in the Journal of Educational Psychology, Bernacki and his colleagues investigated how a study program focused on the learning sciences and the self-regulation strategy impacted Biology students identified, through an algorithm, as at risk of poor performance in the course.

The students did 12% better than the control group on the course final exams.

Bernacki says that the techniques are scientifically based and can be used by anyone, including Brazilian students who want to improve their performance. There are plans to offer a specific course for international students who want to apply to American universities.

Another focus of the researcher’s studies is on the other end of learning: Bernacki is researching ways to help teachers and authors of didactic material to clearly formulate what kind of expectations they have in relation to students.

For example, “What level of understanding do you need to reach (in a given course)? And what are the relevant tools for this? (…) Making this more transparent to students is very important”, he explains.

“Most of us can remember some subject that was challenging, but we knew which route to take, but also subjects where we thought, ‘I really wanted to learn that, but I never knew what the point was or understood what we were learning ‘ This is often very challenging for students and can change the course of some of them.”

This text was originally published here.