You've got a presentation, assessment, or major discussion coming up. You know you need to prep...but what does that actually look like?
No matter your stage in life, odds are that studying is still a necessary part of your skill set.
Studying is, of course, a major part of all phases of the educational journey. But you don't leave this skill behind when you walk across the stage at graduation.
Getting ready for a critical meeting at work and want to make sure you have your key stats down pat? That's studying.
Is your tween grilling you on the members and songs of their favorite band? Yep, staying up-to-date with your kids' most recent obsessions is a form of studying, too.
If studying is such an ever-present fact of life, why are so many of us, well, pretty bad at it?
We're told throughout our lives to study, but almost no one takes the time to explain what "studying" actually entails.
I've got a lot of thoughts about studying, so this post is on the longer side. If you're in a rush, there's a Tl;dr overview at the end.
What most of us think studying looks like
In a meta-analysis of several studies conducted on the study habits of college students, researchers found that a whopping 70% of undergrads rely on re-reading notes, lecture slides, and/or the textbook as their primary study method.
Since so many students use this method, it must be the best, right?
Unfortunately, no. Not only is re-reading not the best study method, it's actually the worst.
That's because re-reading causes us to confuse familiarity with recall.
When we read the same thing over and over, we start to become familiar with the flow. We may even remember what comes next. But, as we re-read, we always have the reminder of the text itself keeping us on track and guiding us to that next point. We've never practiced remembering that order or flow independently, so if we take the text away, we're lost.
In other words, familiarity is only helpful if we have the original text in front of us to jog our memories. When we're in situations where those materials aren't readily available to us, familiarity falls flat.
Which really stinks, because familiarity feels so good. It's not hard-won like recall is. And that's one of the main reasons so many people rely on familiarity-based methods like re-reading: we get a bit of an ego boost while feeling like we're ticking a task off our to-do list.
In reality, though, time spent re-reading is only marginally better than doing nothing at all. The things worth our time and effort are those that push us toward recall.
If recall is so great, why do we avoid it?
The simple answer to this question is that building recall is hard. It's an effortful process, and we spend a lot of the early time in that process being wrong.
No one likes being wrong!
Building recall is a bit like building a pathway. Think about a wild meadow. There's a lot of taming and reshaping that has to be done before you can even uncover a path. That process is time-consuming and frustrating.
But if you take the time to clear some space in the meadow, you'll be able to walk through it more easily in the future. Put in some extra effort to build a concrete pathway, and you'll have an even easier time navigating that journey.
Recall is the pathway between long-term memory and working memory. When we first start practicing recall, it's effortful and slow-going: we're actively building the path. But as we keep trying and strengthening that recall, we also strengthen the pathway.
With enough time and practice, the act of bringing the desired memory or information forward becomes almost effortless.
Okay, okay. Recall sounds pretty good. But how do we do it?
The good news is that there are lots of different study methods that engage and strengthen recall. In short, anything that requires you to quiz yourself in some way--to practice pulling information from long-term memory--is a great fit.
Flashcards
For more factual information like dates, people, definitions, vocab words, and so on, I like to use flashcards.
The act of creating the flashcards is actually your first round of studying the material.
The more senses you can bring into this step, the stronger memory you'll start off with, so I always like to handwrite my flashcards and say what I'm writing out loud as I go.
Then, I run through the flashcards, but I don't just go from front to back. Every flashcard goes in one of three piles: the "I've totally got this" pile, the "I eventually got there, but I had to think about it or got a detail wrong" pile, and the "Wow, have I ever actually seen this before?" pile.
Things that feel completely comfortable after that run-through are done for that day--no use spending cognitive energy on what already feels solid.
The so-so items get shuffled, re-quizzed, and separated again, either into the good pile or the pile that needs extra work.
Finally, the stuff that's in the least comfortable pile gets another memory-boosting treatment like writing and speaking the content, summarizing the content in my own words, or creating a chant or other connection to help me remember especially tricky things. Then, they get re-quizzed and separated, too.
I repeat this process as many times as I need until everything is in the good pile. Then, I shuffle everything--because we don't want familiarity to start us memorizing the order instead of the content--and am ready to start another round of review a couple hours later.
Summarizing
Summarizing in and of itself isn't a very powerful study tool, but there is a way to make it incredibly effective.
We're more likely to remember ideas in our own language versus someone else's.
So, if I'm studying a bigger idea, I take time on the front end to "translate" that concept into my own words, distilling it to its most critical nuggets of information.
This happens for me over a couple rounds of revision. The first is a pure translation, figuring out what the heck the original text is saying, what the critical points are, and how I might describe those in my own words.
I jot down that new version on a whiteboard three times in a row: first, looking at the source material; second, trying to get phrases from memory and double-checking my work as I went; and third, writing the whole concept from memory and double-checking only at the end. If I get everything I need by then, I move on. If not, I try again.
Throughout that iterative process, I usually find that my summaries become shorter and shorter. What might start out as, "Though married to Hera, Zeus carried on many affairs with other goddesses, demigoddesses, and humans, having hundreds of children between them" becomes, "Z + H, Z = horndog, lots of kids mortal --> immortal." It still gets the major points across, but it presents them in smaller units I'm more likely to remember and in language that is already meaningful to me.
Using summarizing in combination with practice testing like this is an incredibly powerful tool for turning long, complex processes or ideas into neatly-packaged stepping stones that, together, outline the overarching idea.
Practice Quizzing
The king of it all, of course, is creating questions similar to what you expect to encounter and practicing answering them from scratch. For more factual information, a great option is to jot questions in the margins of your reading or notes as you read. Then, you can quiz yourself on that content. If you can't remember the answer, you already know it's somewhere on that page!
Broader topics require a slightly different approach. You want to make sure you know the smaller pieces that make up that big idea well enough that you don't just have them memorized, you actually understand how they're connected and how they flow from one into the other.
You want to be able to understand how the chain would be impacted by a change at a certain step.
For example, it's great to know the four phases of the water cycle, but you want to understand their interactions enough to be able to explain how a drought would impact the water cycle. This is the level of understanding most post-secondary educational and professional settings require of us.
Considering the Why
The methods above help a lot with the actual content--the things we have to memorize.
But so much of being ready for an assessment or presentation is knowing not just the what but the why, the connections and bigger picture ideas that make the material at hand significant.
Answers to questions like these don't always come from the text or materials at hand; we have to create them ourselves based on the culmination of our knowledge. Watch out for connections that are suggested in reading materials. Jot down unique ideas from meetings or class lectures so you can revisit and ponder them later. If an idea pops into your head as you investigate a concept, jot it down: that's an easy and natural memory connection that can help you recall and work with that information in the future.
Timing
Our brains are only able to do so much at once.
The more we can spread studying out over time, the more we'll retain, the more our efforts make a difference, and the more comfortable the whole process becomes.
Sleep is really important to memory consolidation, so spreading studying over days and having multiple nights of memory consolidation to back up your work results in significantly stronger memories than those formed through longer cram sessions over just a day or two.
Additionally, our memories are most likely to remember the first and last things we encounter. When we engage in long study sessions, more of the content makes up the middle--the part we're most likely to forget. By keeping study sessions short and targeted, we keep more of those memories accessible.
Even if you want to study for two hours in a day, breaking those two hours into four 30-minute sessions separated by true breaks will yield better results than sitting down to those two hours nonstop.
Of course, to accommodate this spreading, we have to plan ahead. Don't wait to start studying for something the day or two before it happens. I always recommend starting around 10 days in advance. It keeps your time commitment each day manageable, gives you wiggle room in case unexpected barriers come up, and is less disruptive to your normal routines.
Bridging the Gap
- Aim for recall, not familiarity.
- Use study methods that require you to practice pulling information from long-term memory to working memory.
- Early recall practice is uncomfortable. Don't let that dissuade you; it's better to encounter and overcome that discomfort in study time rather than in the assessment or presentation itself.
- Give yourself plenty of time to prepare. 7-10 days is a good goal.
- Keep individual study sessions short and targeted.