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precepts rather than on peripheral material or on a professor’s turn of phrase. Quizzing provides a reliable mea sure of what you’ve learned and what you haven’t yet mastered. Moreover, quizzing arrests forgetting. Forgetting is human nature, but practice at recalling new learning secures it in memory and helps you recall it in the future.
Periodically practicing new knowledge and skills through self- quizzing strengthens your learning of it and your ability to connect it to prior knowledge.
A habit of regular retrieval practice throughout the duration of a course puts an end to cramming and all- nighters.
You will need little studying at exam time. Reviewing the material the night before is much easier than learning it.
How it feels: Compared to rereading, self- quizzing can feel awkward and frustrating, especially when the new learning is hard to recall. It does not feel as productive as rereading your class notes and highlighted passages of text feels. But what you don’t sense when you’re struggling to retrieve new learning is the fact that every time you work hard to recall a memory, you actually strengthen it. If you restudy something after failing to recall it, you actually learn it better than if you had not tried to recall it. The effort of retrieving knowledge or skills strengthens its staying power and your ability to recall it in the future.
Space Out Your Retrieval Practice
What does this mean? Spaced practice means studying information more than once but leaving considerable time between practice sessions.
How to use spaced practice as a study strategy: Establish a schedule of self- quizzing that allows time to elapse between study sessions. How much time? It depends on the material. If you are learning a set of names and faces, you will need to
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review them within a few minutes of your fi rst encounter, because these associations are forgotten quickly. New material in a text may need to be revisited within a day or so of your fi rst encounter with it. Then, perhaps not again for several days or a week. When you are feeling more sure of your mastery of certain material, quiz yourself on it once a month. Over the course of a semester, as you quiz yourself on new material, also reach back to retrieve prior material and ask yourself how that knowledge relates to what you have subsequently learned.
If you use fl ashcards, don’t stop quizzing yourself on the cards that you answer correctly a couple of times. Continue to shuffl e them into the deck until they’re well mastered. Only then set them aside— but in a pile that you revisit periodically, perhaps monthly. Anything you want to remember must be periodically recalled from memory.
Another way of spacing retrieval practice is to interleave the study of two or more topics, so that alternating between them requires that you continually refresh your mind on each topic as you return to it.
What your intuition tells you to do: Intuition persuades us to dedicate stretches of time to single- minded, repetitive practice of something we want to master, the massed “practice-practice- practice” regime we have been led to believe is essential for building mastery of a skill or learning new knowledge.
These intuitions are compelling and hard to distrust for two reasons. First, as we practice a thing over and over we often see our per for mance improving, which serves as a powerful reinforcement of this strategy. Second, we fail to see that the gains made during single- minded repetitive practice come from short- term memory and quickly fade. Our failure to perceive how quickly the gains fade leaves us with the impression that massed practice is productive.
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Moreover, most students, given their misplaced faith in massed practice, put off review until exam time nears, and then they bury themselves in the material, going over and over it, trying to burn it into memory.
Why spaced practice is better: It’s a common but mistaken belief that you can burn something into memory through sheer repetition. Lots of practice works, but only if it’s spaced.
If you use self- quizzing as your primary study strategy and space out your study sessions so that a little forgetting has happened since your last practice, you will have to work harder to reconstruct what you already studied. In effect, you’re “reloading” it from long- term memory. This effort to reconstruct the learning makes the important ideas more salient and mem-orable and connects them more securely to other knowledge and to more recent learning. It’s a powerful learning strategy.
(How and why it works are discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 4.)
How it feels: Massed practice feels more productive than spaced practice, but it is not. Spaced practice feels more diffi -
cult, because you have gotten a little rusty and the material is harder to recall. It feels like you’re not really getting on top of it, whereas in fact, quite the opposite is happening: As you reconstruct learning from long- term memory, as awkward as it feels, you are strengthening your mastery as well as the memory.
Interleave the Study of Different Problem TypesWhat does this mean? If you’re trying to learn mathematical formulas, study more than one type at a time, so that you are alternating between different problems that call for different solutions. If you are studying biology specimens, Dutch paint-ers, or the principles of macroeconomics, mix up the examples.
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How to use interleaved practice as a study strategy: Many textbooks are structured in study blocks: They present the solution to a par tic u lar kind of problem, say, computing the volume of a spheroid, and supply many examples to solve before moving to another kind of problem (computing the volume of a cone). Blocked practice is not as effective as interleaved practice, so here’s what to do.
When you structure your study regimen, once you reach the point where you understand a new problem type and its solution but your grasp of it is still rudimentary, scatter this problem type throughout your practice sequence so that you are alternately quizzing yourself on various problem types and retrieving the appropriate solutions for each.
If you fi nd yourself falling into single- minded, repetitive practice of a par tic u lar topic or skill, change it up: mix in the practice of other subjects, other skills, constantly challenging your ability to recognize the problem type and select the right solution.
Harking back to an example from sports (Chapter 4), a baseball player who practices batting by swinging at fi fteen fastballs, then at fi fteen curveballs, and then at fi fteen changeups will perform better in practice than the player who mixes it up. But the player who asks for random pitches during practice builds his ability to decipher and respond to each pitch as it comes his way, and he becomes the better hitter.
What your intuition tells you to do: Most learners focus on many examples of one problem or specimen type at a time, wanting to master the type and “get it down cold” before moving on to study another type.
Why interleaved practice is better: Mixing up problem types and specimens improves your ability to discriminate between types, identify the unifying characteristics within a type, and improves your success in a later test or in real- world settings
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where you must discern the kind of problem you’re trying to solve in order to apply the correct solution. (This is explained more fully in Chapter 3.)
How it feels: Blocked practice— that is, mastering all of one type of problem before progressing to practice another type— feels (and looks) like you’re getting better mastery as you go, whereas interrupting the study of one type to practice a different type feels disruptive and counterproductive. Even when learners achieve superior mastery from interleaved practice, they persist in feeling that blocked practice serves them better. You may also experience this feeling, but you now have the advantage of knowing that studies show that this feeling is illusory.
Other Effective Study Strategies
ELABORATION improves your mastery of new material and multiplies the mental cues available to you for later recall and application of it (Chapter 4).
What is it? Elaboration is the pro cess of fi nding additional layers of meaning in new material.
For instance: Examples include relating the material to what you already know, explaining it to somebody else in your own words, or explaining how it relates to your life outside of class.
A powerful form of elaboration is to discover a meta phor or visual image for the new material. For example, to better grasp the principles of angular momentum in physics, visualize how a fi gure skater’s rotation speeds up as her arms are drawn into her body. When you study the principles of heat transfer, you may understand conduction better if you imagine warming your hands around a hot cup of cocoa. For radiation, visualize how the sun pools in the den on a wintry
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day. For convection, think of the life- saving blast of A/C as your uncle squires you slowly through his favorite back- alley haunts of Atlanta. When you learned about the structure of an atom, your physics teacher may have used the analogy of the solar system with the sun as the nucleus and electrons spinning around like planets. The more that you can elaborate on how new learning relates to what you already know, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create to remember it later.
