Are you considering or preparing to return to school as an adult? This decision is not only understandable, but also highly beneficial in many ways. Education has a significant impact on our professional careers: it helps us develop new skills, earn promotions, and qualify for jobs requiring specialized expertise.
Of course, a student’s primary goal is to succeed, but why not focus on learning as effectively as possible? After all, if you don’t take the time to do things right from the start, when will you have the time to do them again?
Research has been conducted to better understand the factors that stimulate comprehension and information retention. If your last experience as a student goes back several years, here are some strategies to take your study sessions to the next level.
1. Teaching isn’t just for teachers
According to the National Training Laboratories (n.d.), we retain about 5% of what we hear, 10% of what we read, 20% of what we see on video… and up to 90% of what we teach. In other words, rereading lecture notes just once before an exam helps us retain only a tiny fraction of the content. This approach is far from optimal, unless we read them repeatedly.
Although the exact percentages are debated, several studies support the idea that teaching content significantly improves retention (Hofer et al., 2018; Nestojko et al., 2014; Hendel & Horn, 2008). Teaching forces us to structure our knowledge, identify what we don’t understand, and make corrections to explain it clearly.
While studying, you can “teach” a fictional audience to strengthen your memory and understanding of the material, or explain concepts out loud to yourself. This strategy is more demanding than simply reading, but it often produces much better results. And for the most motivated, why not combine both approaches?
2. Don’t leave your highlighters in the pencil case
It’s time to get out your highlighters-they can help you retain information more effectively. Highlighting encourages you to first identify and then organize important information by comparing it with other content. Marked text also attracts more attention, which aids memory.
However, highlighting too much on a page, without rereading later, reduces the benefit. That’s why it’s important to highlight only what truly matters in order to strengthen retention.
3. One study session is good, but two are better
In a restaurant, you’re not served your starter, main course, and dessert all at once. There’s a pause between each dish, which allows you to build an appetite. In the same way, spacing out your study sessions is recommended to consolidate memory, because the partial forgetting between sessions forces the brain to reactivate knowledge (Cepeda et al., 2006).
This reactivation reduces the risk of forgetting during an exam, because the brain has already reprocessed the information several times. For best results, spread your study sessions over several days or weeks.
4. Practice regularly
No surprise here-regular study is key to success. But there’s a nuance: to optimize retention, practice should ideally be done without relying on the original material (Dunlosky et al., 2013).
Instead of simply rereading lecture notes, try new methods such as practice exams, study guides, or questions from a peer. These approaches create a certain challenge in recalling information, which in turn strengthens your ability to retrieve it later.
5. To infinity and beyond
What if you asked yourself “Why?” about each piece of information? This is similar to what Pressley and colleagues (1987) recommend to deepen understanding of concepts. By questioning the material, you trigger deeper processing, going beyond simple memorization.
This method, called elaborative questioning, also helps you make connections between different areas of knowledge that you might not have linked before. By digging into the meaning of ideas, you understand them better and remember them more effectively.
As you can see, studying effectively is not just about reading and rereading. The key is to vary your strategies to strengthen both reasoning and memory-at any age.
Good luck with your academic journey!
Written by Vincent Fulham-Léonard, career counselor at BrissonLegris
Sources
Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. 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: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
Fisher, M., & Harris, K. R. (1973). The effects of highlighting on reading comprehension and recall. Journal of Reading Behavior, 5(2), 111–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/10862967309547651
Hendel, T., & Horn, K. H. (2008). The relationship between peer teaching and academic performance in a baccalaureate nursing course. Journal of Nursing Education, 47(1), 20–25. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20080101-03
Hofer, S. I., Nistor, R., & Scheiter, K. (2018). From expectation to experience: The role of inducing a teaching intention prior to learning on metacognitive monitoring and learning behavior. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 32(3), 306–314. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3392
National Training Laboratories. (n.d.). Learning pyramid. Bethel, Maine: NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science.
Nestojko, J. F., Bui, D. C., Kornell, N., & Bjork, E. L. (2014). Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages. Memory & Cognition, 42(7), 1038–1048. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-014-0416-z
Pressley, M., McDaniel, M. A., Turnure, J. E., Wood, E., & Ahmad, M. (1987). Generation and precision of elaboration: Effects on intentional and incidental learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13(2), 291–300. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.13.2.291
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