Use This Strategy To Study Smarter This Semester

Ah, studying: the favorite pastime of most college students. Who doesn’t love cracking open a book to read the pages you didn’t read all year to be able to pass the final exam, or opening up your laptop notes to review what you learned in the past few weeks?

Jokes aside, studying is important regardless of how we truly feel about it and there are actually good and bad ways to study, according to a recent press release by Christine Harrington, Ph.D.

Research shows that some study strategies are more effective than others (Harrington, 2016) and most students use the least beneficial study strategy when it comes time to prepare for tests: reviewing notes.

Image by Padurariu Alexandru via Unsplash

Reviewing notes doesn’t take much effort or energy, and the process could cause you to feel too confident with knowing the material even if you don’t know the content well (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011). This overconfidence could make you stop studying too soon (Dunlosky & Rawson, 2012).

While reviewing is a good place to start, to thoroughly learn the material and do well in your classes, learning requires more active engagement with the content. Testing yourself is the best way to do this. According to researchers, students who continually try to recall the information just learned and quiz themselves often learn the most and perform the best (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

Students in the study were asked to learn content one of three ways: study the material four times (SSSS), study the material three times and then test yourself once (SSST) and study the material once and test yourself three times (STTT).

The chart below — taken from the press release – shows that students who spent their entire time studying did the best at first, but after a week, the students who engaged in the most testing did the best even though they spent the least amount of time studying.

This showed that knowing the information five minutes later is not nearly as important as being able to remember the content a week later. Called the “testing effect,” research has consistently found that testing yourself is the best way to learn and this means we need to think differently about tests–namely, as a way to learn rather than as a way to show what we have learned.

Testing yourself isn’t hard with the many mobile and online tools available. Check out Cengage Learning’s MindTap Mobile app for flashcards and quizzes at your fingertips. Creating flashcards is a great way to put the testing effect into practice and taking practice/online quizzes in MindTap will help you make the most of your time by engaging in strategies that work.

Image via Pixabay

About Dr. Christine Harrington

A professor of Psychology and Student Success and the director of the Center for the Enrichment of Learning and Teaching at Middlesex County College in NJ, Dr. Christine Harrington is an expert on student success research and the author of a research-based first-year seminar textbook “Student Success in College: Doing What Works!” 2nd edition published by Cengage Learning.

Dr. Harrington frequently presents at national conferences, colleges and universities on topics such as motivation, maximizing the use of syllabus, rigorous yet supportive curriculum, critical thinking, and dynamic lecturing. For more information about Dr. Harrington, visit her website.