To Study Better, Don’t Start From Zero

In a perfect world, students would use the best study methods that research has to offer—strategies like self-quizzing, spaced practice, and retrieval techniques that are proven to lead to deeper comprehension and better academic performance. 

The reality is that when they study for tests, kids often defer to the passive study strategies they know well, familiar habits like rereading texts, highlighting indiscriminately, or taking haphazard notes. 

A novel 2018 review of decades of research on studying techniques contends that if teachers really want students to integrate evidence-based study methods into their long-term routines, the best approach is to teach learners easy ways to enhance the strategies they already use. In other words, meet them where they are. 

“Given students’ strong preferences in using these strategies anyway, illuminating when they do benefit learning—and when they do not—may at least guide students to use the strategies optimally,” wrote the Washington University in St. Louis research team.  

Students know that simply rereading a text ahead of a history exam is an easy, comfortable way to study, for example, but they are likely unaware that small tweaks to the way they reread—like pausing between sessions, and jotting notes and questions down in between—can result in big comprehension gains.

These tweaks serve another purpose, too. While students may not be inclined to try evidence-based study strategies like self-testing in a silo, convincing them to slip the practice into their rereading routine serves as a “vehicle” to introduce them to “more effective but rarely practiced strategies.”  

Here are some ways to optimize the most common study strategies students use—and expose them to higher-order strategies in the process.

Maximize ReReading 

Many students assume that reading passages a couple of times is enough to process the content, but this approach is “passive in nature,” the researchers say, and often gives students the “false sense” that they’re gleaning insights. 

To improve the practice, teach students to space out their rereading. Spaced readings of a text—just like spaced practice—“produces superior memory performance” compared to rereading that happens immediately after the first read, according to the researchers. 

In a 1987 study cited in the review, students who took just a 30-minute break after their first reading of a short passage and before their second reading, displayed greater recall than those who reread the passage without pausing in between. 

Students can further improve the effectiveness of rereading by adding retrieval practice into the mix. After their first read, challenge students to retrieve the content by writing out summaries in their own words, self-quizzing by asking themselves questions like “How would I explain this to someone else?,” or by sketching quick concept maps. These activities can expose gaps in their knowledge and clarify what they should focus on during the next read. 

less is more When Highlighting and Underlining 

Marking up text comes naturally to students, the researchers write, with students believing that by highlighting a sentence, it’s more likely that they’ll remember the information later. They aren’t wrong. 

Highlighting can be an effective method of storing information, and there is strong evidence that “students can recall marked information better than unmarked information,” the authors of the review said. But the evidence also suggests that marking up text is often ineffective because students either “mark too little or mark noncritical information.” 

Students can correct this—to great effect—with some coaching. 

Students often have difficulty identifying key ideas to mark up, fail to consider the larger structure of a text, and may struggle at first to distinguish main ideas from supporting details. But a 2022 study found that spending as little as a couple of hours tutoring them on proper highlighting techniques can yield a whopping 325 percent improvement in effectiveness. 

Simple tips include asking students to resist marking up a text on the first read, which can help them slow down and “identify the key points to be marked, thus eliciting active, elaborative processing of the text,” the Washington University researchers note. 

UCLA graduate school of education instructor Rebecca Alber also recommends teaching students to take note of key textual features before diving into a reading: Is it a fictional story, or a non-fiction text? If it’s non-fiction, is it meant to be consumed by a specific audience, like a textbook, or a general audience, like a newspaper article? Each medium has different aims worth paying attention to.

As students read the text, Alber suggests asking them to read with an active goal in mind, such as identifying the author’s purpose, arguments, and use of literary devices like foreshadowing and imagery. It’s also helpful to remind students that the margins are their friend, and can be used to leave questions, synthesize information into short summaries, or even draw representations of the idea or detail that has been marked up, which can make the act of highlighting less passive, says high school English teacher Lauren Gehr. 

Note-Taking as Processing

Similar to highlighting, note-taking is typical in most classrooms and reading over notes is often students’ default study method. But how students take notes—and what they do with those notes—can make a big difference in terms of the strategy’s effectiveness.  

When students simply aim to copy lectures down verbatim, taking notes becomes a “relatively ineffective learning strategy,” the Washington University researchers concluded. In fact, this “shallow processing” of information can actually "hinder learning by preventing the learners from engaging with the material more meaningfully.” 

But when students use a generative process to take notes and make sense of newly learned information—by summarizing, paraphrasing, and organizing new ideas in their own words—it can be an extremely effective method for encoding and retaining knowledge. 

Daniel Willingham, an author and psychology professor at the University of Virginia, told Edutopia that instead of trying to write down exactly what a teacher is saying, students should aim to write down what they are thinking about the information they’re hearing. 

This results in fewer notes, and more work on students' part to revise what they take down and make it clearer—but it helps “ensure that the notes are actually serving the purpose,” Willingham said. “You're actually going to be listening, processing, and understanding, and that’s going to help you remember better.” Adding a “turn-and-talk” step to this process can help, too, research shows. According to a 2016 study, students who revised their notes with a partner, rather than alone, recorded more notes and scored higher on exams. 

This deeper processing of notes also works when students are reading texts. A 2021 study found that when students write a short summary—in their own words—about a challenging text and are given a follow-up comprehension test, they vastly outperform students who read a summary of the reading provided by a teacher. To make this more engaging for students, ask them to practice by attempting to summarize their reading in a tweet, a text exchange, or a brief television script. 

Teaching them to exercise this economy of words isn’t just for fun: The Washington University researchers found that students who used fewer words to express critical ideas in their notes are more likely to recall important material than students who use more words.  

Flash Cards on Repeat

Of all the study methods that students favor, using flash cards can be the most effective because it’s a retrieval practice that—when done correctly—helps students learn and retain information, and gauge how well they understand material. 

One of the shortcomings of flash cards, however, is that students often lack the “metacognitive accuracy” to effectively determine if they’ve mastered the information on a flash card before moving on, the Washington University researchers found. Discarding cards prematurely can diminish the effectiveness of spacing and prevents students from storing new information in long-term memory. 

In a 2011 study from Kent State University, participants learned pairs of Lithuanian and English words using flash cards. The researchers found that, after a two-day delay, participants who kept reviewing cards until they could accurately recall the words four or five times remembered 40 percent more words than those who moved on more quickly after correctly recalling words. 

Speaking of delays, coaching students to pause for a day or two after they first successfully run through a set of flash cards is another way to increase information recall. Cramming the night before a test, it’s worth reminding students, will not only make them groggy the next day, it also just isn’t that effective.