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Short answer: the study tips with the strongest evidence are testing yourself instead of rereading, spacing your sessions over days, mixing different types of problems, explaining ideas in your own words, sleeping properly and keeping your phone out of the room. Highlighting, rereading and cramming feel productive but do much less. Start every session with questions, not notes.
What are the best study tips for remembering more?
1. Test yourself instead of rereading. In Roediger and Karpicke's (2006) study, students who practised recalling a passage remembered far more a week later than students who reread it. Use practice questions, flashcards or a blank page. See seven active recall techniques.
2. Space it out. Spreading study of the same material across separate days beats doing it all at once, across hundreds of experiments (Cepeda and colleagues, 2006). Three 30-minute sessions on different days beat one 90-minute session. See our spaced repetition schedule.
3. Try before you look. Attempt the question before checking the answer, even if you're guessing. Unsuccessful attempts make the right answer easier to learn when you see it (Kornell, Hays and Bjork, 2009).
4. Always check your answers. Feedback after each question boosts what you got right and corrects what you got wrong (Butler and Roediger, 2008). Testing without checking can lock in mistakes.
What study tips help you understand, not just memorise?
5. Mix your topics. When maths students practised a mix of problem types instead of one type at a time, they did far better on a later test (Rohrer and Taylor, 2007). Mixing forces you to work out which method each problem needs, which is exactly what the exam asks. See interleaving.
6. Explain it to someone. Teaching material, even to an empty room, shows you where your understanding stops. Fiorella and Mayer (2013) found that actually explaining material helped students learn it more deeply than only preparing to. See the Feynman technique.
7. Ask why. For each fact, ask yourself why it's true and how it connects to what you already know. Dunlosky and colleagues' (2013) review rated this "elaborative interrogation" as moderately useful, better than rereading or highlighting.
8. Use past papers. In the final weeks, nothing matches the real format and time pressure. See how to use past papers.
What study tips help with focus and energy?
9. Phone in another room. In one study, students with their phone in another room did better on memory and reasoning tasks than those with it on the desk, even face down (Ward and colleagues, 2017). Later attempts to repeat it have been mixed, but leaving the phone elsewhere costs nothing.
10. Work in blocks with real breaks. 25 to 50 minutes of focused work, then a break away from the screen. See the best study intervals.
11. Protect your sleep. A study of university students by Okano and colleagues (2019) found that better sleep quality, duration and consistency during the term went with better grades. An all-nighter trades the memory you've built for a few more hours of tired reading.
12. Make your space easy to work in. A clear desk, comfortable temperature, decent light and no lyrics in your headphones. See how a cozy study space helps you focus.
Which popular study habits don't help much?
- Rereading: rated low utility by Dunlosky and colleagues (2013). It makes material feel familiar, which isn't the same as being able to recall it. See active recall vs rereading.
- Highlighting: also rated low. Fine for marking what to test yourself on, not as studying in itself.
- Cramming: it can get you through tomorrow, but you'll forget most of it soon after, and you'll need it again for finals.
- Rewriting notes neatly: it looks productive and mostly practises handwriting. Turn notes into questions instead.
How do you put these study tips into a week?
- After each lecture: turn it into questions and answer them the same day.
- Two or three days later: answer the same questions again from memory; reread only what you missed.
- Weekly: a mixed session across every topic so far, ideally with a friend.
- Every night: phone away and a consistent bedtime.
The hardest part is usually step one: writing the questions. Ace turns your own lecture slides, PDFs or YouTube lectures into practice questions, checks every answer against your material and shows the sentence that backs it, so you can start with testing straight away. More in how to study for exams.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most effective study tip?
Testing yourself, spaced over several days. Practice testing and spreading out your practice are the two techniques rated high-utility in the major review of study methods.
How many hours a day should I study?
There's no magic number. A few focused, spaced sessions of active recall beat long hours of rereading. Start with what you can do consistently and protect your sleep.
Is it better to study in the morning or at night?
Whichever you can keep consistent without cutting into sleep. Regular sleep matters more than the time of day you study.
Sources
- Roediger, H. L. & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. PDF
- 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. PubMed
- Kornell, N., Hays, M. J. & Bjork, R. A. (2009). Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(4), 989–998. PubMed
- Butler, A. C. & Roediger, H. L. (2008). Feedback enhances the positive effects and reduces the negative effects of multiple-choice testing. Memory & Cognition, 36(3), 604–616. PDF
- Rohrer, D. & Taylor, K. (2007). The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. Instructional Science, 35(6), 481–498. Springer
- Fiorella, L. & Mayer, R. E. (2013). The relative benefits of learning by teaching and teaching expectancy. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 38(4), 281–288. doi.org
- 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, 14(1), 4–58. APS summary
- Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A. & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140–154. Journal
- Okano, K., Kaczmarzyk, J. R., Dave, N., Gabrieli, J. D. E. & Grossman, J. C. (2019). Sleep quality, duration, and consistency are associated with better academic performance in college students. npj Science of Learning, 4, 16. PMC
