Hey guys, welcome back to the blog! If you're new here, my name is Saeed. I've recently completed my master’s degree in biotechnology. Today, we're kicking off a new topic where I'll be sharing evidence-based revision tips with you. I'll be giving you advice on how you can prepare for your exams, and I'll be backing up everything I say with evidence from studies that have been done in the field of psychology, on students like you and me, over the last hundred years.

 


No one ever really teaches us how to study. We tend to just go with what feels intuitively right. As we'll see, the research has shown that the techniques that students think are the most intuitive often tend not to be the ones that are the most effective. So, if you've got exams coming up, then hopefully by the end of this blog, you'll pick up some techniques that you can apply to your studies to make everything a little bit more efficient and enjoyable.

 

This is going to be the structure of the blog.

 

  1. Firstly, I'm going to be talking about the three very popular revision techniques that are shown to be less effective in the literature, namely rereading, highlighting, and making notes or summarizing. Those are by far the most popular techniques, but they're also not very effective if you look at the evidence behind them.
  2. Secondly, I'm going to introduce the concept of active recall, which is by far the most powerful and effective study technique. And that involves testing yourself and practicing retrieving information from your brain because the very act of retrieving information strengthens connections in the brain. And there's a load of evidence behind this.
  3. Finally, in part three of the blog, I'll be giving you some specific tips on how you can apply this active recall thing to your study. So, hopefully, by the end of the blog, you'll have some practical strategies that you can apply if you feel like it.

 

Let's jump into it, and let's talk about the three common but not very effective revision techniques that students love to use.


Over here is going to be a list of some of the various studies that have been done that showed that students love rereading as a common revision technique. The question is, is rereading effective as a study technique? There have been lots of studies done about this. I will link one of them here, but I'm not going to go into each of them in depth. Instead, I'm going to be quoting from a paper written by Professor John Loski, which was written in 2013, where he and his colleagues analyzed hundreds of papers looking at all the research behind ten different study techniques.

 

On the topic of rereading, he said, "Based on the available evidence, we rate rereading as having low utility. Although rereading is relatively economical concerning time demands when compared with other learning techniques, rereading is also typically much less effective. The relative disadvantage of rereading to other techniques is the largest strike against it, and it's the fact of the weighted most heavily in our decision to assign it a rating of low futility."

 

Here's another quote from a 2016 paper that again looked at the evidence behind lots of study techniques. "A wealth of research has shown that passive repetitive reading produces little or no benefit for learning. Yet not only was repetitive reading the most frequently listed strategy, but it was also the strategy most often listed as students' number-one choice by a large margin."

 

So, generally, according to the evidence, rereading is ineffective. It does sort of work, but compared to other things you could be doing, it's by no means the most efficient study tactic.

 

 Secondly, I'm going to be introducing the concept of active recall which is by far the most powerful and effective study technique, and that involves testing yourself and practicing retrieving information from your brain because the very act of retrieving information strengthens connections in the brain and there's like a load of evidence behind this and finally in part 3 of the blog I'll be giving you some specific tips on how you can apply this active recall thing to your study so hopefully by the end of the blog, you'll have some practical strategies that you can apply if you feel like it as always.

 

Finally, I’ll be introducing the three common but not very effective revision techniques that students love to use.

 

Let's start with rereading. 

Various studies have been done that showed that students really love rereading as a common revision technique, and if you look at what you've done for your exams and ask your friends, you probably find out that rereading plays a big part in most people's exam preparation strategy. The question is, is rereading effective as a study technique? Hundreds of papers all the research behind 10 different ruin techniques, and this is what Prof Loski had to say on the topic of rereading. He said, based on the available evidence, we rate rereading as having low utility. Although rereading is relatively economical concerning time demands when compared with other learning techniques, rereading is also typically much less effective. The relative disadvantage of rereading other techniques is the largest strike against it, and it's the fact of the weighted most heavily in our decision to assign it a rating of low futility. So, this professor, who's a psychology professor, and he and his colleagues have looked at hundreds of research papers looking at evidence-based revision techniques, regards rereading your notes or rereading your textbooks as having low utility. He said, "Yeah, there's some limited evidence that rereading does work, it does improve retention somewhat, but especially if you compare it to other techniques that you could be doing, rereading is pretty much a waste of time."

 

That's what I'm going to say about rereading for the time being. I'm very happy to discuss all the evidence against rereading and against these other techniques if you guys want to hear about that, just leave a comment down below and I'll do it. But I want to focus on stuff you can do rather than kind of just hopping on the stuff that you shouldn't be doing. So, we'll close that for now. Rereading, generally according to the evidence, is ineffective. It does sort of work, but you know compared to other things you could be doing, it's by no means the most efficient study tactic.

 

 

Secondly, let's talk about highlighting. Either we highlight ourselves or we know friends who like to highlight their textbooks and the notes in pretty colours.

 

When the texts are difficult, it may hurt performance on higher-level tasks that require inference, making it especially challenging without subjective GCSE most subjects at A-level, and everything at undergrad. All these subjects require inference-making, so highlighting presents a key staying, probably not a very good tactic. He continues, saying future research should be aimed at teaching students how to highlight effectively, given that students are likely to continue to use this popular technique despite its relative ineffectiveness.

 

So, he's conceding in his paper that although the evidence shows that highlighting is not very good, to be honest, students are probably going to continue using it. A little later in the paper, he describes highlighting as a safety blanket that students like to have. I've experienced this, as I'm sure you have as well. If it feels productive, doesn't it? Like going through a book and highlighting one thing in blue, another in yellow, and another in orange. I used to do it all the time. But you know, the evidence says it's not very good. We could be doing more efficient things.

 

Finally, let's talk about summarizing or making notes. Again, a popular technique that I have been using pretty much all my life and still use to this day. But I'm trying to phase it out because the evidence around summarizing and making notes is a bit equivocal. Some studies show that students who summarize well perform slightly better on exams, but it's quite hard to test this because, as you can imagine, the quality of notes varies massively between students, making it quite hard to conduct a proper, rigorous scientific study about it.

 

In any case, Professor Dan Loski and his colleagues tried; they looked at all the evidence around summarizing and making notes, and this is what they said: 'Based on the available evidence, we rate summarization as a low utility. It can be an effective learning strategy for learners who are already skilled at summarizing. However, many learners, including children, high school students, and even some undergraduates, will require extensive training, which makes the strategy less feasible.'

 

What they're saying is that if you already know how to effectively summarize and make notes, which you might well do, although it tends not to be taught in schools or anything, if you already know that, then okay, summarization is probably helpful for you. But even if that's the case, even if you're already quite proficient at summarizing, it still falls about the middle of the pack when compared to other, more effective revision techniques. But I think in general, the conclusion we should draw from this is that we are sort of wasting our time, probably, by making notes.

 

Now, that's not to say that if you enjoy making notes, you shouldn't do it. You know, I enjoy making notes, having pretty colors, trying to do a bit of calligraphy on them, taking photos for Instagram, my friends comment on it like, 'Oh, you know, it's so pretty.' But to be honest, I wouldn't want to make notes thinking it's an effective revision strategy. And looking back on the school days, a lot of my friends who were really into their notes, you know, those who had these massive blue folders for chemistry and had beautiful notes, those were the students that would spend hours and hours on a single topic, and then kind of complain sometimes about why stuff wasn't going in. So, yeah, making notes, summarizing sort of works, probably, but the evidence is a bit iffy about it. I think we should be avoiding it personally, based on the results of these review papers.

 

Alright, just to sum up what we talked about so far: we've said that rereading, highlighting, underlining, and summarizing/making notes are probably not very effective revision strategies based on the evidence. So, yeah, if we want to make our revision more efficient, we probably shouldn't be doing these three things that we all like to do.

 

We had a lecture about this in our second year of university, towards the end of the year when we had exams coming up. And my mind was completely blown when I found out that highlighting and making notes was not very efficient. Talking to a lot of my friends, we were all aghast that, you know, how could we have survived these 22 years of our lives without knowing effective study techniques? And that we felt that a lot of our success in exams had been despite our revision techniques, rather than because of them.

 

So, hopefully, at this point, you're thinking that, okay, maybe we should be spending a little bit less time doing rereading, highlighting, and making notes. Let's now talk about active recall.

 

Active recall is, by far, the most important technique that you can and should be using to make your studies more efficient. Active recall, active retrieval, or practice testing, or whatever you want to call it, basically involves retrieving facts from your brain. Retrieving stuff from your brain strengthens the connections between the stuff in your brain. This was quite counterintuitive to me. For me, anyway, I'd always kind of assumed learning was this sort of process whereby you put stuff into your brain, and the only purpose of getting stuff out of your brain was to ace that exam or get that A or whatever.

 

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Over a hundred years of research has shown that we learn far better by retrieving stuff from our brains than by trying to put stuff back into our brains. What's the evidence behind this? Let's go back to Professor Dan Loski's review paper, you know, the one where he looked at hundreds of studies and decided that rereading, highlighting, and summarizing wasn’t very good. This is what these guys had to say about practice recall, active recall, and practice testing: 'Based on the evidence described above, we rate practice testing as having high utility. Practice testing is not particularly time-intensive relative to other techniques, and it can be implemented with minimal training. Finally, several studies have provided evidence for the efficacy of practice testing in representative educational contexts.'

 

So, this review paper that's looked at loads of studies again, they've said practice testing has very high utility. If you read the paper, in their conclusions, they recommend that everyone start testing themselves more, if they're not doing it enough already.

 

Now, because this is important, I'm going to be sharing with you three different studies that show this properly. If you're already convinced by the active recall at this point, you can skip it if you want to. But we'll just be talking about the specific strategies that you can use to implement active recall in your studies. But if you're interested in the evidence, then continue reading, and I'll explain some of the studies that have been done that convincingly show that active recall is by far a better revision strategy than pretty much anything else you can do.

 

So, let's start with this study from 1939, the start of World War II. You know, this sort of research has been going back literally decades and decades. What they did was that they got groups of students and made them learn a topic, then gave them a test either a week later or a day later. Now, half of these students just kind of studied the material as they normally would, and these are their results below. As you can see, their results were about 50% for the high achievers and around 30% for the bottom third of the group, as decided by some other outcome measure. So, that was half of the group, they just studied the subject as they normally would have done and got a test either a day later or a week later.

 

Now, the other half of the class studied the content in the same way, however, they had a practice test at the end of it, and these are their results. As you can see, the guys who had the practice test did far better. It's an increase of like 15% for the high achievers, an increase of like 10 to 15% for the bottom third of the class, just by having a practice test at the end of their study session. It improved their performance by 10 to 15%. I don't know about you, but if I could improve my exam performance by 10 to 15% just by practicing and testing myself a bit at the end of each study session, I would certainly take that. But that's just one study.

 




Let's talk about another study, a more recent one, from 2010. Again, they split students up into two groups: one group was going to have a practice test, and the other group was just going to re-study the material using whatever method they wanted, most likely rereading, highlighting, and summarizing, which, as we've seen from other studies, are the most popular revision techniques of students. This study was interesting because it tested students on both facts and concepts. Here is the group that just restudied the material normally, and these are their results. They were hovering between 30% and 40% because they just studied the material once and then had a test a week later. And here is the group that studied the material, had a little practice test at the end of it, and then had the same test a week later, and these are their results. As you can see, they're performing significantly better. For some, it's even an increase of like 30% for the first group, a difference between 30% and 60%.

 




Again, I don't know about you, but if I could get a 30% improvement in my exam score by practicing testing myself, I would certainly take it, and I would be doubling down on that strategy as much as I possibly could.

 

Finally, one of my favourite studies, this one's from 2011. What they did was they split students into four different groups. They had to learn some material and then had a test at the end, like a week later or something. Now, the first group was just supposed to study the text, the chapter once. The second group was supposed to study it four times. The third group read the text once and then made a mind map. The fourth group read the text once and then just tried to recall as much of the contents of the text as they possibly could.

 

On verbatim questions, or questions specifically from the text about factual things mentioned in the text, the group that studied once performed the worst, as you can see. The active recall group performed significantly better than the group that restudied it four times. This kind of tells me that if I just practice testing myself once, that's probably more effective than rereading the chapter four times. And rereading a chapter four times is such a common strategy that, you know, it's insane that you can get better results by just testing yourself once instead of reading it once and then just trying to recall as much of it as you can.

 

Let's take these same groups of people and ask them inference questions, the questions that require you to understand the text a bit more, not just retrieve isolated facts from it. The group that studied it once performed the worst, as you'd expect because they only studied it once. The active recall group performs the best, and the other groups perform right. Again, active recall, practicing just writing down as much as they could remember from the text, improved their results significantly more than the students who read the text four times.

 

So, I think there's solid evidence that active recall is a useful strategy. But these guys being clever psychologists, had a third phase of the study. Before doing any of this, they asked the students what they thought the results of the study would be. So, they asked the students to kind of guess which of these techniques would be the most effective. The students rated repeated study as being the most useful technique, and they rated active recall as probably the least effective one.

 

So, this kind of goes to show that our intuitive idea of what makes a good study technique does not match up with the evidence at all. We think that reading something repeatedly, of course, is going to increase our understanding, increase our retention of it. But just reading it once and then just practicing testing yourself is just so much more efficient. That is insane that this isn't taught in schools more often.

 

And there's a really good book called "Make It Stick," that you can read more about these sorts of techniques if you want. And they go into more depth about the exact evidence behind these techniques. But even then, they say that the two most important things are active recall, which we're talking about in this blog, and spaced repetition. Hopefully, I've convinced you that rereading, highlighting, and summarizing/making notes are not very effective revision strategies, based on the evidence. Again, links are down below, if you want to read it for yourself. Hopefully, I've convinced you that active recall, or practice testing, is a useful technique and it's far more efficient than those techniques that students enjoy using.

 

Now, we're going to be talking about specific strategies that you can use to implement active recall, or practice testing, in your studies. And the first thing to say is that this is not rocket science. Pretty much anything you do that requires you to use cognitive effort, like using brain power to retrieve information that you have learned once already, pretty much anything is going to be efficient for you. But having said that, I know a lot of you guys benefit from specific strategies, so here are three that I find useful.

 

Firstly, number one is an app called Anki. Anki is a flashcard app that you might have heard of. Lots of medical students use it. The idea behind it is that you make a flashcard, like an online flashcard, and then it comes up in your review session. But the special thing about Anki is that once the flashcard comes up, you can mark it as easy, medium, or hard, and depending on what rating you gave it, it comes up later. Depending on what that rating was, if you found a fact easy to recall, maybe they'd ask you again in a day. If you find it hard to recall, they'll ask you again in 10 minutes. If you find it impossible to recall, they'll ask you again in one minute. And this kind of learns from your behavior, it changes over time. So, as you progress through your studies, as you progress through your revision, some easy facts, you might see them in two months because the whole algorithm changes, and it uses this whole spaced repetition thing to great effect. I think Anki is good for two things. Firstly, I think it's good for memorizing particular facts. So, I used it a lot for microbiology back in the day. I used it a lot for learning the names of bacteria what they do, and what the mechanism of action is. In my third year, when I was doing Genetics as a subject, I also used Anki a lot to memorize paragraphs for when I was writing my essays. On one side of the flashcard, I would have "Population genetics and Genetic diversity," and on the other side of the flashcard, I would describe the study that they did the evidence behind it, and what I was going to say about it. So, therefore, in the essay in the exam, when I wanted to recall, I would have kind of information about it already memorized. So, I used it to memorize chunks that I could then drag and drop into my essays effectively.

 

Secondly, something that I like doing because I still can't quite break the habit, you know, I enjoy making notes, is making notes with the book closed. So, not like having the textbook open and making notes and making all pretty and copying from the textbook like I used to do, but learning a topic, then closing the book, and then thinking, "Okay, how would I explain this topic? How would I kind of make my notes on it?" So, then I write down as much as I can remember about the topic in a nice fashion with pretty colors because that makes me feel good. And then afterward, I open the book and see the bits that I missed. And, when I was preparing for my third-year exams, it ended up being by far the best performance ever in my life on any exams. And I think the reason behind that was that I very aggressively used these two techniques of spaced repetition and active recall. So, what I did, was I made about 50 different essay plans initially, earlier on in the year. And then, to commit this to memory, I just drew spider diagrams with the book closed. So, I would have a spider diagram for each essay plan, and I just drew as much of it as I could remember. And then afterward, when I was done with it, I'd look at my actual essay plan and fill out the bits that were missing. I repeated this over like two months leading up to the exams. By the end of it, by the time the exam came around, I had these 50 good essays in my head that had like 10 references each, and I was able to just kind of vomit them onto the paper in the actual exam. So, I would fully endorse this whole making notes, making spider diagrams with the book closed as being an effective method of active recall. And there is some evidence behind this. Again, it's in the book "Make It Stick," and it's also in Professor Dan Loski's paper. You can read it down below.

 

Finally, I want to talk about a third strategy, and that's an alternative to making notes. I know that this whole making notes thing, it's hard to not make any notes these days. If I'm in a lecture or if I want to learn something, instead of making notes from the lecture or the textbook, what I do is that I write questions for myself. And I think this is called the Cornell note-taking method. I came across that earlier today when researching stuff for this blog. The idea is that you write questions for yourself based on the material, and then when you want to go over it again when you want to revise it, you read the question and then try and recall as much as you can from memory before looking at the answer. And if you don't get the answer, then you look at the answer and then you go again. And this kind of again uses that whole process of active recall, which we know to be a useful revision technique.

 

And you can even get clever with it. You can get someone else to make the notes for you, and then you write the questions for yourself, and you don't even look at the notes at all, so you can kind of quiz yourself on it. And I've seen people kind of put the questions on one side of a flashcard and then the answers on the other side, so you can kind of flip it over and then see how you did.

 

So, those are the three specific strategies that I find useful. Firstly, Anki. Secondly, making notes with the book closed. And thirdly, write questions for yourself based on the material. I hope you found this useful. If you did, please do leave a like/clap, follow if you're new here, and I'll see you in the next blog. Bye bye!


References:

Improving Student's learning

Study habits of highly effective medical students

Cornell Note Taking System