How to Study Effectively: Techniques Backed by Memory Research

Most students study the way that feels productive: rereading notes, highlighting, going over a chapter until it looks familiar. Memory research has spent decades showing that familiarity is a poor guide to what you’ll actually remember. The techniques below are the ones with the best evidence behind them. For each, this guide covers what it is, how to do it, and how strong the evidence is. If you only change two things, make them the first two.

1. Test yourself instead of rereading

What it is. Retrieval practice means pulling information out of memory: answering questions, writing down what you remember, explaining a topic without notes.

How to do it.

• After reading a section, close the book and write down everything you can remember, then check what you missed. This is often called a brain dump or blank-page recall.
• Turn your notes into questions, and answer the questions instead of rereading the notes.
• Use flashcards, but say the answer out loud before you turn the card over.
• When you’re watching a lecture or video, pause every ten minutes or so and summarise the last section from memory.

The evidence. Strong. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) found that students who took recall tests on prose passages remembered substantially more two days and a week later than students who spent the same time restudying, even though restudying made students feel more confident. In Karpicke and Roediger (2008), students who kept being tested on vocabulary they had already learned recalled about 80% of it a week later; students who kept studying it but were no longer tested recalled about a third. Our piece on the benefits of quizzes goes through these studies in more detail.

2. Space out your reviews

What it is. Reviewing material over several sessions spread across days or weeks, instead of in one long block.

How to do it. A simple schedule works: review the day after you first learn something, again a few days later, then a week or two after that. If the exam is months away, let the gaps keep growing. Flashcard apps such as Anki schedule this for you, and a calendar reminder works too.

The evidence. Strong. A review by Cepeda and colleagues (2006) pooled 839 assessments from 317 experiments and found that spaced practice consistently beat massed practice. A later study (Cepeda et al., 2008) found that the best gap depends on how long you need to remember the material: the longer you need it, the longer the gaps should be. Cramming can get you through tomorrow’s test, but it’s a poor way to keep anything for longer.

3. Mix problem types once you know the basics

What it is. Interleaving means mixing different kinds of problems or topics in a session, instead of doing all of one type and then all of the next.

How to do it. When you practise maths, science or grammar, mix the question types instead of working through a block of near-identical problems. When you revise several topics, rotate between them. Learn a new method on its own first, then mix it in with the others.

The evidence. Good for maths, and still being tested in other subjects. Rohrer and Taylor (2007) found that students did better during practice when problems were grouped by type, but did better on a test a week later when they had practised with mixed problems. Mixing feels harder, and that’s part of why it works: you have to decide which method a problem needs, which is exactly what an exam asks you to do.

4. Ask “why?” and explain it to yourself

What it is. Elaboration means connecting a new fact to what you already know by asking why it’s true or how it works. Self-explanation means putting an idea or a worked solution into your own words.

How to do it. For each key fact, write one line on why it’s true: “the heart has four chambers” becomes “the heart has four chambers so that oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood stay apart.” Explain a topic in plain language as if to someone new to it; the places where your explanation turns vague are the gaps to fill. This is often called the Feynman technique, after the physicist Richard Feynman, who was known for explaining complicated ideas simply.

The evidence. Reasonable, and it works best alongside retrieval practice rather than instead of it.

5. Draw diagrams from memory, not from the book

What it is. Turning notes into diagrams, concept maps or sketches, so information is held in pictures as well as words.

How to do it. Draw the map or diagram with the book closed, then check it against your notes and correct it. Copying a diagram while the book is open does much less.

The evidence. This one comes with a caution. In Karpicke and Blunt (2011), students who practised recalling a science text did better a week later than students who built concept maps with the text in front of them, including on questions that required inference. Concept maps are a fine way to organise material; making them from memory is what adds the retrieval benefit.

6. Group information into chunks

What it is. Working memory can only hold a few items at once. Chunking means grouping information into meaningful units so that each unit counts as one item.

How to do it. Group a long list by category. Learn a sequence as a few familiar patterns rather than many separate items, the way a phone number is easier to hold as three groups of digits. Look for rules that tie facts together, such as shared word roots.

The evidence. Well established as a description of how memory works. George Miller’s 1956 paper popularised “seven, plus or minus two” as the limit of short-term memory; later work, reviewed by Nelson Cowan (2001), suggests the real limit is closer to four chunks. Either way, grouping lets you hold more.

7. Use a memory palace for ordered lists

What it is. The Method of Loci: you picture a route you know well, such as the walk through your home, and place each item you want to remember at a spot along it.

How to do it. Choose a familiar route with clear stopping points. Put one vivid, exaggerated image at each stop. Walk the route in your mind a few times, then test yourself later that day and again the next.

The evidence. Good for ordered lists and sequences. Maguire and colleagues (2003) found that top memory competitors did not have structurally different brains or higher general intellectual ability than ordinary controls, and that most of them used spatial strategies like this one. It’s a specialised tool, not a replacement for retrieval practice and spacing. Our Method of Loci guide explains how to build one.

8. Protect your attention

What it is. Studying in focused blocks with distractions removed.

How to do it. Put your phone in another room and close any tab that isn’t part of the task. Timeboxing helps: the Pomodoro technique uses 25 minutes of work and a 5-minute break, but the exact numbers matter less than stopping on purpose and starting again on purpose. If you’re studying an online course, put fixed study blocks in your calendar as if they were classes, because nothing else will make them happen.

The evidence. This is practical advice more than research finding. The benefit comes from the time actually being spent on study.

9. Sleep after learning

What it is. Memories formed during the day are consolidated during sleep.

How to do it. Keep a regular sleep schedule through exam periods, and don’t trade a night’s sleep for extra hours of study the night before an exam.

The evidence. Strong. Many studies, including work by Robert Stickgold and Matthew Walker, show that sleep supports memory consolidation and that losing sleep after learning makes later recall worse.

10. Exercise a few hours after studying

What it is. Physical exercise timed after a study session.

How to do it. If you exercise anyway, a session a few hours after studying is a good slot for it.

The evidence. Promising, but narrower than it’s often reported. In van Dongen and colleagues (2016), people who exercised four hours after learning a set of picture–location pairs remembered them better two days later than people who didn’t exercise. Exercising immediately after learning made no measurable difference.

Putting it together: a two-hour session

1. 0:00–0:10 — Quiz yourself on material from earlier sessions. That’s spacing and retrieval at once.
2. 0:10–0:40 — Learn new material, stopping after each section to recall it with the book closed.
3. 0:40–0:45 — Break.
4. 0:45–1:15 — Practise problems or questions, mixing in older topics.
5. 1:15–1:20 — Break.
6. 1:20–1:50 — Switch subjects and repeat the learn-then-recall cycle.
7. 1:50–2:00 — Write down what you got wrong today. Those items open your next session.

Habits to drop

• Rereading as your main method. It builds familiarity, which feels like knowing but isn’t the same thing.
• Highlighting as a substitute for thinking. Deciding what matters is useful; colouring it in does little on its own.
• Cramming. It can get you through tomorrow, but you won’t keep much of it.
• Only practising what you already know. Getting questions right feels good. The ones you get wrong are where the learning is.

For a weekly routine aimed at general knowledge rather than exams, see how to improve general knowledge. To practise retrieval right now, pick a quiz category and play a round.

Sources

• Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
• Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., & Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095–1102.
• Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114.
• Karpicke, J. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772–775.
• Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968.
• Maguire, E. A., Valentine, E. R., Wilding, J. M., & Kapur, N. (2003). Routes to remembering: The brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1), 90–95.
• Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97.
• Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
• Rohrer, D., & Taylor, W. P. (2007). The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. Instructional Science, 35, 481–498.
• van Dongen, E. V., Kersten, I. H. P., Wagner, I. C., Morris, R. G. M., & Fernández, G. (2016). Physical exercise performed four hours after learning improves memory retention and increases hippocampal pattern similarity during retrieval. Current Biology, 26(13), 1722–1727.