10 Smart Study Tactics That Support How The Brain Actually

Works

Heres the problem with what Im about to tell you: these tactics may may be news to you,
but in psychology circles most of them have been around for decades. Why does this matter?
Because it means we could all have been getting smarter this whole time. Instead, we seem to
be stuck with the same old notions of how learning works.
Whats especially baffling is that these principles are actually quite easy to put into practice.
Heres one: instead of sticking to one location, simply alternate the room where you study in
order to remember new information better. Heres another: studying for one hour each night
works; studying all weekend doesnt. Still we havent caught on.
We have known these principles for some time, and its intriguing that [institutions] dont
pick them up, or that people dont learn them by trial and error, says Robert A. Bjork, a
psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Instead, we walk around with all
sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.
So the question is, what can we do to change this? What can we do save ourselves from
ignoring the facts and perpetuating an endless cycle of poor learning habits?
Lets start with the principles themselves.

1. Test yourself before youve studied.

Its called pre-testing. Benedict Carey, author of How We Learn, says its one of the most
exciting developments in learning-science. What does it entail? Pretty much exactly what it
sounds like: quizzing yourself on new material before youve reviewed your notes.
Across a variety of experiments, psychologists have found that, in some circumstances,
wrong answers on a pretest arent merely useless guesses, Carey explains. Rather, the

attempts themselves change how we think about and store the information contained in the
questions. On some kinds of tests, particularly multiple-choice, we benefit from answering
incorrectly by, in effect, priming our brain for whats coming later.
On one hand, it alerts students to the scope of the subject and what they will likely be tested
on in a final exam. UCLA psychologist Elizabeth Bjork says, Taking a practice test and
getting wrong answers seems to improve subsequent study, because the test adjusts our
thinking in some way to the kind of material we need to know.
Also, pretesting helps with something called fluency illusion. This is the little voice in your
head that says that you know the answer to a question when, really, you might not.
Pretesting will often reveal these fallacies that were carrying around in our heads.

2. Space out your study sessions over time.

UC Irvine neurobiologists Christine Gall and Gary Lynch found that mice trained in three
short, repetitious episodes spaced one hour apart performed best on memory tests. The mice
performed poorly on memory tests when trained in a single, prolonged sessionwhich is a
standard K-12 educational practice in the U.S.
Its been known since classic 19th century educational psychology studies that people learn
better when using multiple, short training episodes rather than one extended session. Two
years ago, the Lynch and Gall labs found out why. They discovered a biological mechanism
that contributes to the enhancing effect of spaced training: brain synapses encode memories
in the hippocampus much better when activated briefly at one-hour intervals.
This explains why prolonged cramming is inefficient only one set of synapses is being
engaged, said Lynch, professor of psychiatry, human behaviour and anatomy, and
neurobiology. Repeated short training sessions, spaced in time, engage multiple sets of
synapses. Its as if your brain is working at full power.

3. Change up your study environment.

Rather than sitting at your desk or the kitchen table studying for hours, finding some new
scenery will create new associations in your brain and make it easier to recall information
later. Also, by changing your environment, your brain is forced to retrieve the same
information in different places and will therefore see that information as more useful and
worth holding onto.
The brain wants variation, says Carey. It wants to move, it wants to take periodic breaks.
You dont have to have the same chair, the same cubicle, the same room, to do your
memorisation.
Better news yet: Changing context, changing environment, he says, aids retention.
These findings related to the psychological concept of context dependent learning, which
has been around since the 1930s. The gist of it is this: When a student tries to recall
information in an exam, they will be able to recall it best if they learned it in an environment
which is similar to the exam environment.

In one of the original education-related experiments on context dependent learning, students

were asked to study meaningful information under either quiet or noisy conditions.
Afterwards, they were asked short-answer and multiple choice questions on the previously
learned material, which prompted both recognition and recall. Half of them were tested under
silent conditions and the other half under noisy conditions. The participants whose noiselevel matched during studying and testing conditions remembered significantly more
information than those whose noise-level was mismatched.
The researchers concluded that students should take into consideration the context of testing
while studying, in order to maximise their performance on both recall and recognition tasks.

4. Take regular naps (seriously).

In 2013, sleep researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that daytime
naps support learning in preschool children by enhancing memory.
Research psychologist Rebecca Spencer, with students Kasey Duclos and Laura Kurdziel,
studied more than 40 preschool-aged children and discovered that children who napped
performed significantly better on a visual-spatial task later the same day, as well as the
following day, than those who did not nap.
To explore the effect of sleep stages and whether memories were actively processed during
the nap, the researchers recruited an additional 14 preschoolers who came to a sleep lab and
underwent polysomnography, a record of biophysiological changes, during their average 73minute naps. Here Spencer and colleagues noted a correlation between brainwave activity
and memory consolidation during sleep.
Essentially we are the first to report evidence that naps are important for preschool
children, Spencer says. We offer scientific evidence that the midday naps for preschoolers
support the academic goals of early education.
These benefits extend to adult education, too.

5. Quiz yourself instead of re-reading.

Repeated studying after learning had no effect on delayed recall, but repeated testing
produced a large positive effect, wrote Jeffrey D. Karpicke and Henry L. Roediger III in a
report on the topic. In addition, students predictions of their performance were uncorrelated
with actual performance. The results demonstrate the critical role of retrieval practice in
consolidating learning and show that even university students seem unaware of this fact.
When you reinforce your memories by testing them, they get much stronger than if you
simply re-read a passage. Dont waste your time trying to re-read rules or textbooks in order
to memorise them. Test yourself to bolster your memory.

6. Check in with yourself periodically.

Being aware of your own learningsomething psychologists call metacognitionis
invaluable when it comes to studying. You may think you have a good idea of what you have
learned and what you have left to learn in a course or during a test prep session, but the more

explicit about it you are, the better. Rather than assuming youve been absorbing everything
you read, make a list of everything you actually remember. Then go back and see what
concepts youve missed.
For best results, do this on all levels: for a specific chapter, a whole unit, and your entire
course. Refer to your syllabus if you have one so you can see the bigger picture.

7. Separate process from progress.

Learning is a funny word. We use it quite liberally to refer to everything from memorising
to remembering to forgetting to knowing. We all understand that its a process, but can we
explain the difference between process and progress? When you receive high marks on a test
or in a course, does it mean youre done learning about that particular subject? Does it
mean youve mastered the material and completed the learning process? No, probably not. It
means youve made progress in your education according to a certain set of standards.
The learning process never ends. Dont let all your hard work go to waste by abandoning a
subject after the course is over.

8. Look forward to forgetting.

Making mistakes while learning can benefit memory and lead to the correct answer, but only
if the guesses are close-but-no-cigar, according to new research findings from Baycrest
Health Sciences.
Making random guesses does not appear to benefit later memory for the right answer, but
near-miss guesses act as stepping stones for retrieval of the correct information and this
benefit is seen in younger and older adults, says lead investigator Andree-Ann Cyr, a
graduate student with Baycrests Rotman Research Institute and the Department of
Psychology at the University of Toronto.
These results have profound clinical and practical implications. They turn traditional views
of best practices in memory rehabilitation for healthy seniors on their head by demonstrating
that making the right kind of errors can be beneficial. They also provide great hope for
lifelong learning and guidance for how seniors should study, says Dr. Nicole Anderson,
senior scientist with Baycrests Rotman Research Institute and senior author on the study.
Bjork agrees, adding that forgetting can actually be good for the brain. In fact, it can serve as
a powerful spam filter. Under a principle she calls desirable difficulty, when the brain has
to work hard to retrieve a half-forgotten memory, it re-doubles the strength of that memory.
If you sit down to study a load of material, of course youre not going to remember most of
it the next day, Carey adds. You do have to go back and build your knowledge. But its not
that you dont remember well, or youre not a good learner. Its that forgetting is a critical
part of learning.

9. Imagine youll be teaching someone else.

When students expect to teach new material to others, they remember more of that material
correctly and organise their recall more effectively, says John Nestojko, PhD, a postdoctoral
researcher in psychology Washington University in St. Louis.
In a recent study published in Memory & Cognition, Nestojko found that simply telling
learners that they would later teach another student changes their mindset enough so that they
engage in more effective approaches to learning than did their peers who simply expected a
test.
In the experiment, which involved a series of reading-and-recall tests, one group of students
was told they would be tested on a selection of written material, and another group was led to
believe they would be preparing to teach the passage to another student. In reality, all
participants were tested, and no one actually engaged in teaching.
When teachers prepare to teach, they tend to seek out key points and organise information
into a coherent structure, Nestojko says. Our results suggest that students also turn to these
types of effective learning strategies when they expect to teach.

10. Study to learn, not to know.

Think about how you phrase things during a study session: I know Newtons law, I dont
know marginal utility theory, Do you know the quadtratic formula? When we study in
order to know things, that knowing often becomes quite shallow, because all it really means
is Will I remember this long enough to regurgitate it on a test? Viewing information this
way undermines deep learning. Instead, approach new material with the goal of truly learning
it, with the goal of remembering it well enough to use it or refer to it some day ten years
down the road. Doing so will boost your ability to retain it in the first place.
What were seeing here are smart, actionable strategies to promote better learning. And not
just learning for the testlearning for life. Its possible that the current educational climate,
which emphasises standardised tests and measures of performance, isnt conducive to
improved learning habits. We tend to focus on short-term achievement, and maybe thats why
practices like cramming and intense, cell-block style study sessions are the norm. When we
do get over this hurdle, and begin valuing learning over performing, maybe well start to see
more genuine interest in adopting these principles.