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Stop studying! If you want to remember what you’ve learned.
The best way to remember what you learn is to stop studying. You’re welcome. You can leave now if you want. Or hang around a bit and learn the science behind this truism.
Many students define their studying, in a practical and everyday sense, as reading and re-reading their textbooks and notes. They are convinced that this repetitive exposure will stuff into their brains everything that they want to learn and remember. Read a book twice, and you’ll learn the content much better than if you read it once. Right? Nope. There’s also a common variant of this tactic that many students employ. We’ll call this the read, highlight and re-read the highlights tons of times technique. That’s a very efficient and very effective studying tactic. Right? Nope, wrong again.
These studying strategies don’t create durable and lasting long-term recall of learned material. It’s a lot of heat but not much light. Sure, with a bit of luck and timing your efforts towards the last days or even the night before that big exam, you might ace the test but, are you satisfied with being capable of recalling far less than 50% of that material a month later? Because of the forgetting curve, that’s the result you’ll end up with. Did you really invest your time, effort and money, solely to achieve the first letter in the alphabet on your transcript? Or — did you want to learn and also achieve long-term durable long-term recall and moreover, the ability to use your newly acquired knowledge at any time in the future?
Traditional study techniques are not the road to long-term memory. What is learning without recallability? How can we best attain what we really want: learning and remembering what we learn, for as long as we desire? The answer is by taking advantage of the testing effect, what some also call, “retrieval practice” or “test-enhanced learning.” It has been proven in numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies that testing is the most effective technique for creating durable long-term recall.
When you test yourself or when your teacher tests you, your efforts to retrieve learned material reinforce the neural pathways that create excellent recallability. The more that you tread the neuronal path to a memory, to that nugget of knowledge that you learned, the easier it becomes to find and follow that path back when you need to access it in the future. Also, if you practice retrieving material from memory in different contexts, such as being in a different physical location, you create new associations and alternate pathways to your memories. This greatly enhances your ability to retrieve what you’ve learned.
Let’s take a step back and separate the two fundamental aspects of conceptual learning. The first and absolutely requisite step is understanding the concept. Without achieving understanding and building a mental model (often subconsciously) or attaching of the new knowledge to your existing knowledge base, there can be no learning, and there is no purpose in committing anything to long-term memory. Once you have an understanding and a mental model, you then need to commit what you’ve learned to memory. Once the concepts and associated facts are stored in long-term memory, and you have some recallability, you’re now prepared to use your knowledge in the future to solve related and even seemingly unrelated problems. But, recallability needs maintenance. Spaced out retrieval practice over time tends the garden of your knowledge and learnings.
So, most of the time, the best strategy is to read once and “wrap your head around” the new concepts and facts. Once you’ve done that, and once you’ve associated the new material with prior knowledge, you’ve achieved the most fundamental level of learning. Now, the best time investment that you can make is to harden your ability to recall this knowledge is by testing yourself–not by re-reading and re-studying or re-reading the material. The testing effect not only produces much better results than re-reading, it’s far more efficient timewise.
the optimal strategy is to create your own flashcards, that go into a trusted repository, and get shown to you, just around the time you’re about to forget the material
How can you apply these principles in your everyday life? The answer is simple, but it does require that you shift your paradigm and stop doing things the old way. Now, when you learn new material, for instance, you read a textbook, stop highlighting and don’t come back routinely to re-read the book or re-read highlights. Instead, make flashcards as you learn. Use these flashcards to test yourself at spaced out over time. Whenever you read a question on a flashcard, take the time to make a serious effort to recall that thing you previously learned. Even if you are unable to recall the correct answer, seeing the answer on the other side, after attempting effortful recall, will harden the memory and make it easier to successfully recall the material in the future. By utilizing the testing strategy, no matter how well you do in practice, you still win!
What about the practical details–the hassles and friction that make creating flashcards and knowing the optimal time to study them? How can you make it easy on yourself to switch to this highly effective study technique? Use a spaced-repetition flashcard software system.
But be forewarned. While you could use flashcard sets created by other people, these are not anywhere near as effective as the flashcards that you create, in your own words, based upon your mental models as you learn. So, the optimal strategy is to create your own flashcards, that go into a trusted repository, and get shown to you, just around the time you’re about to forget the material. If you’re already using spaced-repetition flashcards, please share your experiences in the comments.
