This states that a learning task that requires a considerable amount of effort will improve long-term performance, even though it may initially slow down learning. If you are practicing recall without verifying the accuracy, you may be reinforcing incorrect information.Ĭlosely intertwined with active recall is the concept of desirable difficulties. Lastly, remember to not only practice the recall part but to also check your answers. Do not neglect comprehension, which means truly understanding the relation between ideas and how certain concepts are similar or different. Particularly with flashcards, students may focus too much on individual facts without adequate comprehension. It becomes easier with time!Īnother common mistake is studying facts in isolation. And with anything in life, with practice, you’ll get better at it. The key is to understand that if it feels difficult, that means it’s working. Many students try active recall for a short period of time, only to give up soon after because they find it difficult. Afterward, check what you’ve written compared to your class notes for accuracy and to fill in points you may have missed. For example, you could write or sketch out everything you know about a certain topic without looking at your notes. There are other ways to incorporate active recall, though. When it comes to active recall, I normally advise students to create flashcards through Anki or to use practice problems, which has the added benefit of practicing higher order thinking. You should expect active recall to be a difficult process, as active learning methods are, by definition, far more challenging than passive forms. If you aren’t using it yet, there’s a bit of a learning curve that may be discouraging. If you’re already using active recall, chances are you love it because of the resulting drastic improvement in performance. This brings us to the second evidence-based study strategy.Īctive recall is the practice of using the Testing Effect to your advantage. Instead, spaced repetition is most effective when combined with active recall, whereby you test yourself for the answer. Rereading your notes is a form of recognition, whereby you look at some facts and tell yourself, “oh yeah, I know that.” This is unreliable. When practicing spaced repetition, make sure you’re using effective study strategies and not simply rereading your notes. This undermines any of the potential advantages of spaced repetition. The most common mistake is procrastination and cramming just days before the exam. You could create a study schedule for yourself where you plan out when to review older lectures in addition to recent lectures.Īlternatively, you can offload the process to other apps, like Anki, which will test you on bite-sized pieces of information through flashcards and automatically schedule the cards based on the difficulty of recall for each. I recommend you take this same approach with spaced repetition. I’m a big proponent of using tools and systems to streamline and automate processes. Studying for 8 hours over 2 weeks will generally result in superior performance compared to studying for 8 hours in one sitting. If we see the same information multiple times over increasing intervals, we’ll be far more effective at encoding those facts into long-term memory.

If too much time passes, you forget and are unable to recall the desired information. If too little time elapses between repetitions, the information is not reinforced as strongly. Spaced repetition is most powerful when the timing is just right. By repeated exposures to a piece of information at increasing intervals between each repetition, we can optimize memorization and retain the most information in the least amount of time. The problem is that we have far too much information to learn-we can’t repeat every fact we need to know on a daily basis. We know from neuroscience fundamentals that repetition potentiates neural connections and allows us to remember information more effectively. With attempts to retain the information at increasing intervals, just before we forget it, the memory becomes more durable. In its simplest terms, the Forgetting Curve demonstrates that after forming a memory, we gradually forget more and more of it as time elapses. We can thank the psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus for studying his own memory and generating what is known as the Forgetting Curve. In this article, I’ll break down 7 evidence-based study techniques with supporting scientific evidence, as well as how to implement them. We can do the same when it comes to studying strategies. Med School Insiders Balance & Wellness ScholarshipĪs doctors, we treat patients with evidence-based medicine, meaning treatment modalities that are backed by sound scientific research.

Areas and volumes student study session