What are the most effective ways to study for a test (and which ones don’t work as well)?

It’s not uncommon for students to feel frustrated when they don’t get good grades despite studying hard for a test. There are also those who feel that they quickly forget what they have learned a few weeks before the test.

These are two of the challenges that are especially important for students new to university, who are faced with much more voluminous and complex content than what they receive at school and often have to balance studies with work.

“There are students who they try tremendously, but in the wrong way and they accumulate a lot of superficial or declarative knowledge, without being able to reach a more conceptual level,” Matthew Bernacki, associate professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Education, in the United States, told BBC News Brazil.

Bernacki is dedicated to the science of learning, which in practice means helping students make the most of the time and effort invested in their studies.

In his work, he explains which techniques have proven to be more or less effective, according to his own scientific research and that of other researchers in the sector.

Based on their conclusions, we offer you three of the usual techniques that they consider less effective together with alternatives on how to replace them in practice.

1. Reread and underline:

Although reading and underlining texts are an important part of learning, they are usually not enough for students to master the content studied.

Rereading, in particular, requires effort and time that is not always worth it, because “it gives a false sense of familiarity with the content.”

“When you leave the text, you can’t reproduce what you’ve read,” says Bernacki.

“As for the underlining, there is conflicting evidence: if (the technique) is used as an intentional process, reflecting on what is being underlined in the text, taking notes and using them to advance the (study) strategy, it can be very productive”, says the researcher.

“But if you underline for no particular purpose, or if you do it just as a way to keep the focus on the text, you may get less benefit.”

Replace it with:

“Active” learning:the UNC Learning Center views reading as a pre-learning step. To really learn the content, it is more effective to actively engage with it. Here are some ideas from the center to do so:

• Create questions, problems, or “quizzes” for yourself to answer. This is what Bernacki calls the “practice of reacquisition” of content.
• By testing you, you increase your ability to retain content that you have studied, explains the researcher.
• Explain the content to yourself, out loud, in your own words.
• For technical content, such as mathematics, it is convenient to detail the problem and the steps to solve it.

2. Study at the last minute:

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

“We tend to cram the entire study into a very small interval, which may work in the immediate, but not in the long term,” Bernacki explains.

Replace it with:

Short, spaced study sessions: Instead of studying for several hours just the day before the exam, it’s more worthwhile to have short study sessions spaced out over several days on the content you want to learn.

“The important thing is how you use your study time, not the length of it,” says the director of the learning center. “Long sessions cause loss of concentration and, consequently, less learning and retention”.

In practice, you may go to study the same time (or less) than if you left everything for the day before.

The upside is that it gives your brain time to strengthen the neural connections for that learning, which is more likely to become a lasting memory.

3. “Multitask”:

There are already multiple investigations that indicate that studying with distractions -for example, from WhatsApp messages or videos on TikTok- is inefficient not only because you are dividing your attention, but also because the very fact of constantly changing the screen or device makes you waste time and energy.

Replace it with:

The “pomodoro” technique, or study in blocks: Bernacki’s recommendation to avoid distractions is to establish study blocks. For example, mark 35 minutes on the clock and, in that period, dedicate yourself exclusively to studying content, disconnecting from all distractions.

Afterwards, you have five minutes to reward your brain with some distraction, for example, having a snack or checking your messages. And then you come back for another 35 minute study block.

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

effective techniques

Bernacki has applied these techniques and monitored their results primarily among groups of students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) courses and also among first-generation college students, that is, young people who are the first in their family to attend collegewho usually have a smaller repertoire of study techniques to function in this difficult period.

In a study published in 2022 in the Journal of Educational Psychology, Bernacki and colleagues investigated how a curriculum focused on science learning and a self-regulation strategy impacted biology students who were algorithmically identified as students. with the risk of obtaining poor results in the course.

The students obtained 12% better results than the control group in the final exams of the course.

final advice

• “Self-regulation” in the study

Bernacki points out, however, that it is not enough to apply the previous techniques as if they were magic formulas that work at all times, but it is necessary to identify which techniques are the most appropriate for each learning objective. This happens through what the expert 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 fits it,” he explains.

“Sometimes the 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 have to generate your own knowledge and your own answers so you can self-assess: ‘Have I understood this correctly?’

Bernacki claims that the techniques are scientifically based and can be used by any student in the world who wants to improve their performance.