Study Strategies That Don’t Work and How to Tweak Them
A group of researchers looked at the results of studies that examined the effectiveness of certain study strategies (that kind of review is called a meta-analysis). On this page, you can see an explanation of the five strategies that had the best evidence of effectiveness.
What may surprise you is that a few common strategies were not supported by the research.
| Introduction |
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| Not all of the studies they looked at involved college students, but the researchers’ findings can be helpful for you in thinking about what kind of time you’re putting into these strategies and why you might not be getting the best results from them. |
| What Wasn’t Supported By the Research |
| Keyword Mnemonic |
| What the research found: Students only remembered the information they needed right after they learned the mnemonic (which is a memory device – in this case, a visual image linked to the target word). Students did remember the word right after they learned the mnemonic, but they didn’t do well when tested after a delay. Also – the researchers noted that this technique is really only useful for concrete words (mostly objects). |
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What to think about if you want to use this: The strategy was good for memorizing vocabulary for other languages, so if you want to use it, make sure you practice enough with it. (See this page for more information on how to self-test effectively. Since college-level terms aren’t always easy to match with mental images, it may be helpful to create acronyms (words made up of the first letter of other words) to help you memorize steps or related terms. The mnemonic you create has to be easy to remember (ex. HOMES, using the first letter of each Great Lakes) and you have to make sure you spend enough time reviewing each individual term so that when you use the mnemonic, the letters that make it up trigger you to retrieve them. (Ex. if you can’t remember Lake Ontario, then the O in HOMES isn’t going to help.) Or you may not need to add this level of complexity to studying – don’t spend time creating mnemonics unless you find they are more helpful to you than studying terms individually. |
| Highlighting and underlining |
| What the research found: Some students underlined too much, so information didn’t stick out (and they may not have processed that information very thoroughly). Others didn’t highlight enough. One key point here is that students were tested on the material after they highlighted text but without getting to look at it again. |
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What to think about if you want to use this: What kinds of things will you have to know on the test? Are you highlighting everything you might need to know? Also – highlighting is just one step in a process. You can probably agree that just looking over the stuff you’ve highlighted probably isn’t very helpful. If you do something with your highlights, such as create a set of notes from the text you highlighted, then you can do self-testing with that information. See this page for suggestions on how to highlight effectively and what to do with your highlights. See this page for hints on self-testing. |
| Summarization |
| What the research found: Students who summarized did well on exams that required application of knowledge, analysis, free recall, or essay exams but not on multiple-choice ones. Also – quality and details matter. If you write a pretty brief summary of information but you need details for your exam, they won’t be easy to remember if you didn’t put them in your summary. |
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What to think about if you want to use this: Are you actually good at summarizing? The research showed that some students had stronger skills than others. Are you writing summaries with enough details to be useful? Rather than spending time summarizing what you’ve read, you might be better off organizing highlighted sections of text into a set of notes that can serve as a study guide. (See highlighting tips here.) Then use the techniques here to guide how often you review those and how you choose material to study. |
| Rereading |
| What the research found: This was fairly effective in studies, but the studies didn’t use readings from actual courses, so researchers weren’t sure it would be as effective with “real” texts. Also – it wasn’t as effective as the strategies that showed better effectiveness. |
| What you should think about if you want to use this: While the research didn’t address this, one reason to avoid re-reading is your interest level. Do you really want to re-read text you’ve already read, or would you prefer to study notes from that text (created from your highlights) in a way that is more effective than re-reading? These other strategies may be a better use of your time. |
| Final thoughts |
| The thing to keep in mind when studying is what you’ll be asked to do on exams. In liberal arts classes you’ll probably have to retrieve information from your head and get it down on paper (or a screen) in a way that demonstrates you have mastery of material and can include all relevant details. In math and science subjects, you will probably have to solve problems, sometimes using formulas. Whatever you’re doing, the goal is efficient retrieval. See this page for explanations of the effective study techniques. |
A Note about Flashcards
These were not included in the metanalysis, but it is a strategy some student use. Remember that the best way to use them is to make sure your practice testing involves using the information in the way you’ll need to on a test. So if you are practicing by looking at the side with the term you need to know, write the explanation or definition down, then flip the card over to make sure you’re not missing any important information. Remember – professors won’t ask you to think of the answers, you’ll have to write them down in your exam.
Also, after you have some information down pat, put those cards away for a little while, then quiz yourself with them again. You need to do a little forgetting, then “retrieving” (by writing it down again), to solidify information in your memory.
*Reference – Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques, and illusions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 417–444. doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143823