Learning for exams
Why & When
Well, when you have an exam coming up 😉 Most of the ideas below are targeted at learning in general anyways, be it in an academic or non-academic setting.
Goal(s)
- Spend your learning time efficiently & effectively
- Retain knowledge & understanding long-term
- Enjoy learning
Getting started
Planning
The first thing to note is that exam success does hardly depend on the few weeks before the exam itself, but rather on your whole semester. Starting to learn early and consistently will, in the long run, save you enormous amounts of time and stress and will also improve your exam success. Part of this is having a more or less clear overview on what is going to be covered or assessed and what it is you want to learn. This should also include a clear idea on what is not interesting or too important, either for yourself or the exam. Try to get an overview of topics and contents via the syllabus or ask the teacher / lecturer for it.
Techniques
There are several learning techniques that have been scientifically proven to yield much better results than what is commonly used by many students and learner. Try to stick to these as you learn!
Spaced-Repetition
One of the most important concepts is spaced repetition. This means that you should repeat content in increasingly longer intervals to ensure long-term retainment (word??). So, concretely, if you've just learned something, repeat it first on the next day, than after 3 days, after 7 days, after two weeks, and so on. Repetition interval should depend on how well you were able to remember something on a given day (e.g. when you had lots of trouble after 7 days, maybe throw in another repetition 2 days later). The aforementioned overview of learning content can be combined with this, i.e. you can make a table with all the content for a given course and track when you repeated which topic to help you keep an overview.
Active Recall
Active Recall means recapitulating everything you know on a topic or question you are learning without checking your notes or sources. There is an immense learning edge to this over re-reading notes or trying to immediately fill in your gaps. Try to remember everything you know for as hard as possible until you are absolutely certain that you will not remember anything else. It is only then you should check back with your notes to see if you have forgotten anything. This will then subsequently show you on which gaps you need to focus more.
Useful tools can be using MindMaps or SpiderDiagrams, but also writing down bullet points, full texts or talking to a friend about it. If you happen to have temporal lackage of friends, it is absolutely fine to talk to your chair or any other attentive listener that can't escape.
Elaboration
Elaboration is the act of purposefully laying out a topic, talking about associative thoughts, explaining concepts, drawing connections to other knowledge and in general being very verbose about answering a question or talking about a topic. This can very much be combined with active recall (not using your notes for recapitulation).
Interleaving
Interleaving means to disperse the learning you're doing in a certain amount of time across several topics. It has been shown that this can lead to better learning outcomes than block or massed learning. As an example, you might be inclined to learn one whole week for one topic, another whole week for another topic and so on. Research indicates that interleaving those topics over two weeks can be more effective. Of course, you should not overdo it and switch topics every thirty minutes. Try to find some balance that works for you!
Breaks
Probably the most important and undervalued in learning (and work in general)! Take. Breaks. A lot.
Your ability to understand and retain information will immensely benefit from you being on top of your game, and you will likely be more on top of it if you take breaks. A good rule of thumb is to take a 5 minute break every 25 minutes when learning (as that has been shown to be the average time a student can fully concentrate). Of course, this will vary from person to person, but do remember that people are generally very bad at accurately assessing their concentration level and learning effectiveness at a given point in time. If in doubt, take the break.
Also, several shorter breaks are way more effective than few long breaks. Studying for two and a halve hours and taking a thirty minute break will typically be much worse than doing six 25/5 blocks - especially if you plan to continue after the initial three hours.
What NOT to do
There are several techniques that are widely used by learners that are incredibely ineffective. Typically, you'll want to avoid these
- Summarizing: There's almost no learning effect when summarizing texts, syllabi, textbooks while having it in front of your eyes. Of course, if you're doing it with Active Recall, you're good to go!
- Underlining: Typical study technique - next to no effect. As long as you just use it to underline important concepts without recapitulating them later by memory, you can leave this be.
- Re-Reading
- Cramming
Supportive Tools
- Anki
- Excel / Word / Notion (for creating plans)
- think-cell (for creating semester plans)
Further remarks
- Notes on group work
- Restructuring your environment
- Smartphone use
- ...
Links & Further reading
Videos
- Ali Abdaal - How to study for exams: There are numerous videos and guidelines on how to study effectively. Yet, Ali Abdaal has managed to narrow it down to the essentials that have scientific backing.
- Marty Lobdell - Study Less, Study Smart: An entertaining yet insightful overview of pitfalls and useful techniques for studying effectively.
