Testing yourself, and spreading it out
The short version
- Two methods come out ahead of the rest: testing yourself on material rather than rereading it, and spreading study across days rather than stacking it into one long session.
- Both cost more per hour and both feel like failing while you do them. The comfortable methods — highlighting, rereading — are the ones rated lowest.
- This is a fault in the instructions, not in you. Almost everyone was told to revise and never told what the word meant.
At some point you were sent home to revise, and nobody said what to do with your hands. So most people invented the same method: read the chapter, underline the parts that look important, read it again closer to the exam. Then, when the results arrived, they treated them as information about themselves rather than information about the method.
The method is the part worth changing first.
What the research puts at the top
Dunlosky and colleagues went through the techniques students actually use and rated each one for how well it holds up across subjects, ages and kinds of test. Two were rated high utility: practice testing and distributed practice. Highlighting and rereading — the two things nearly everybody does — were rated low (Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2013).
Practice testing means retrieving the material from memory instead of looking at it. Roediger and Karpicke gave students material and had some restudy it and others test themselves on it; testing beat restudying (Psychological Science, 2006). Distributed practice means the same total study time broken across days instead of massed into one sitting. Cepeda and colleagues pulled that literature together and found spaced study beat massed study (Psychological Bulletin, 2006).
Neither of these is exotic. They are both slight adjustments to what you already do with your evening.
Why rereading feels better and works worse
The second time through a page, nothing snags. The sentences arrive smoothly and you understand each one as it comes. That smoothness is real, and it gets read as evidence — I know this.
It is evidence about the page, not about you. The text is doing the work of prompting you, sentence by sentence, and you are confirming rather than producing. In the exam the page is absent and nothing prompts anything. Recognising material and being able to generate it are further apart than they feel, and rereading trains only the first.
Testing yourself takes the page away. You find out what you can produce, and the answer is usually thinner than you expected. That unpleasant gap is not a sign the method is going badly. It is the method.
Where it pays and where it costs
It pays where you have a term rather than a night, and where the material is cumulative — a subject built of facts, terms, mechanisms, worked procedures, anything you will be asked to produce without notes. Across weeks, short spaced sessions on one topic will leave you able to do more with it than one long block, and the difference widens the longer the gap between studying and being tested. If your exams are in May, this is the technique the whole spring should be built on.
It costs in ways worth naming plainly. Retrieval practice is slow — you cover far fewer pages an hour, and the visible output is a page of things you could not remember. It feels like failing, repeatedly, on purpose, which is why most people try it once and go back to rereading by Wednesday. It also needs a runway: if the exam is Thursday and you have not opened the module, there is nothing to spread study across, and cramming is the correct response to that situation. And on material you have not yet understood once, testing yourself returns nothing but a blank. Comprehension first, retrieval after.
What the setting can do
Students are currently expected to build their own question banks out of material they do not yet understand, which is the hardest possible version of this. Departments can remove that step almost for free.
Three things are worth asking a module lead or a course rep for, in writing: past papers released with indicative answers rather than kept back; a bank of practice questions on the module page; and low-stakes weekly quizzes that carry no marks and exist only to make retrieval available. The last one costs a lecturer an afternoon and changes what every student in the cohort is able to do.
There is also a timetabling point. A module that releases all its assessment at the end, and its topic list late, has designed massed study into the course and then attributes the result to student habits. Asking for the topic list in week one is asking for the runway that spacing needs.
Small things to try this week
- Take one topic. Blank page, ten minutes, write everything you can recall, then check it against your notes. The gaps are your revision list, already sorted by priority.
- Turn the headings in one set of notes into questions. That is your question bank, and it took four minutes.
- Revisit one topic you studied on Monday again on Friday, briefly. Same topic, short, days apart. That is the whole of spacing.
If you try this for a few weeks and nothing shifts, that is useful information. It usually points at the conditions — no question bank, no past papers, a topic list that arrived in week nine — rather than at the technique.
Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.