Learning that lasts: what the science says about studying

Most of us study the way we were never taught not to: we reread our notes, highlight the important lines and feel confident because the material looks familiar. Familiar is not the same as remembered. Decades of research in cognitive psychology point to a small number of habits that make learning last, and they are not the ones that feel easiest.

Test yourself, do not just reread

In a well-known experiment, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (2006) asked students to study short prose passages. Some reread the passages; others took practice tests on them. Five minutes later the rereaders did slightly better. One week later the picture reversed: the students who had practised recalling the material remembered much more. Retrieval does not only measure learning, it changes it. Karpicke and Janell Blunt (2011) later found that retrieval practice also beat elaborate study with concept maps on tests of understanding.

Spread practice over time

Cramming works for tomorrow and fails for next month. Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues (2006) reviewed hundreds of experiments on spacing and found a consistent advantage for practice spread across days, with the best gap growing as the time you want to remember it grows. Short, repeated sessions beat one long one.

Some techniques simply work better

John Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) reviewed ten popular study techniques. Two earned the highest rating for usefulness across ages, subjects and materials: practice testing and distributed practice. Highlighting, rereading and summarising, the habits most students rely on, received low ratings.

Feedback that points forward

Feedback is one of the strongest influences on learning, but not all feedback helps. John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007) describe good feedback as answering three questions: Where am I going? How am I going? Where to next? Praise about the person adds little; feedback about the task and about how to improve adds a lot.

Active classes beat passive ones

Scott Freeman and colleagues (2014) analysed 225 studies of university science and engineering courses. Students in classes with active learning scored higher on exams, and students in traditional lecture courses were about one and a half times more likely to fail.

How Universal School uses this

Every lesson on the platform can become practice: flashcards from its key points, a quiz at three levels with feedback that explains each answer, a daily review that brings back what you are about to forget, and spoken key points you can listen to between other things. None of this replaces a good teacher. It gives every learner the habits that the research says matter most.

References

• Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
• Karpicke, J. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199327
• Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. Psychological Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
• Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487
• Freeman, S., et al. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111