How to study for exams

As students we spend a lot of time studying and we are trying to get the best results with the least effort possible. We are trying to learn as efficient as possible. But are we really doing that? I spent most of my study hours in school on taking notes, highlighting, reading textbooks and taking notes. Studys on the psychology of learning show that those learning techniques are most ineffiecient and that we should rather spend our study time on active recall and spaced repetition. In my first year of studying biochemistry I implemented these study techniques into my workflow after watching a video of Ali Abdaal talking about evidence based study techniques. I significantly benefited by changing my learning habits and I think you can be too by getting a broad overview of my key learnings in this article.

The main principle that you should follow while studying for exams is that studying should be hard. So rather than passively rereading your notes, you should always learn active, which brings me right to the main study technique I want to talk about in this blog post: Active Recall. What is active recall ? It basically means testing yourself. It includes doing practice papers or mock exams, using flash cards, covering your notes and trying to remember them, asking yourself questions while reading a text and many more tools which go in the same direction. For all these techniques you are actively retrieving information from your brain. This increases the connectivity of the neurons in your brain and makes the information stick, so you can remember it when you need it while taking an exam. Using active recall is hard, because your brain has to actively think to find the information that you learned previsiouly. Like I said before learning should feel hard and only if it does you are actually doing it efficient and the right way.

The second principle that you should follow is spaced repetition. We all had those exams, where we procrastinted until the night before the exam and had to cram all the information into our brain by learning all night long. I probably don`t have to tell you, that cramming is not the best way to get good results in an exam and retrieving the information for longer than a week. And there is actual evidence proving that spaced repetition, so learning in intervals is the way to go. Scientists found something which is called the forgetting curve, which basically says that whenever you learn something new your knowledge of this information decreases over time. But the good thing is that there is a way to shift this forgetting curve further back by repeating the information in spaced intervalls. If you learn a new information you should repeat this information the day after, the week after and the month after. By doing this you make this information stick in your brain and harder to forget. A great tool to integrate spaced repetition into your work flow is Anki. It`s a free flashcard app, which lets you learn the information in customazible intervalls.

The third and last technique I want to talk about is interleaving and it is connected to the main principle I mentioned in the beginning that learning should feel hard. It includes learning your different subjects, principles and topics within a subject by switching between them during a day of learning. So if you are learning for a math exam and you have to able to apply different math principles you shouldn't be spending one day learning the first principle and on the second day the second principle and so on. You should rather switch between the different principles. This makes it harder for your brain and it takes more effort to retrieve the principle you want to learn. This forms stronger connections in your brain and it will be easier for you, to apply the different principles in the exam.

This was just a broad overview of the most efficient study techniques and I would recommend reading the book "Make it stick" and checking out Ali Abdaals videos to get a deeper inside into the topic.

I hope you enjoyed this article and you found some new insights into the psychology of learning, which you can apply in your next exam season.