How to study so it sticks.

Four techniques backed by learning research, and how to use each one.

How to study

Understand. Learn by heart. Practise. Space it out.

1
Research Teach it to learn it Students who explained a lesson out loud, as if teaching it, did better a week later than students who only restudied it.
Feynman technique

Understand

You can’t memorise or apply what doesn’t make sense, so this comes first. Explain the topic in plain words to someone else: a friend, a classmate, an empty room. Wherever you stall or reach for the lecture’s jargon, you’ve found a gap.

  1. Read the deep notes for one topic.
  2. Explain it out loud, as if to a first-year who missed the lecture.
  3. Mark where you got stuck or turned vague.
  4. Go back to the notes, fix those spots, and explain it again, more simply.
Open Deep notes

The Feynman loop

Repeat until it’s simple STEP 1Learn it STEP 2Teach it simply STEP 3Find the gaps STEP 4Fix and simplify

Explaining something in your own words is one of the quickest ways to find out what you don’t understand yet.

2
Research Keep recalling, even once you know it Students who kept recalling words from memory remembered 80% a week later. Students who kept rereading them instead remembered 36%.
Blurting

Learn by heart

Read a summary until you understand it, close it, and write down everything you can remember. Then open it, see what you missed, and do it again. Each round brings back more, until the whole page comes out without looking. Writing from memory like this is retrieval practice, one of the best-supported memorisation techniques in learning research.

  1. Read one summary and make sure it makes sense.
  2. Close it. Write down everything you remember, in any order.
  3. Open it and mark what you missed or got wrong in another colour.
  4. Repeat, focusing on the gaps, until nothing is missing.
Open summaries

Words remembered one week later

36%
80%
Kept rereading,
stopped recallingKept recalling
from memory

Both groups had learned every word. The only difference was whether they kept recalling it. The students themselves predicted the same score either way.

3
Research Practice questions pay off on the real exam Students scored 78% on exam material they had practised with questions, against 63% on material they had only reviewed.
Reps

Practise

Exams are pattern-based. The same question types come back year after year, often with only the numbers or the facts changed, so many questions in your exam will look familiar from previous papers. Every rep makes you quicker to spot which pattern you’re looking at and which method it needs. The more questions you’ve done, the fewer surprises the exam has left.

  1. Do the chapter’s exercises without looking at the solutions.
  2. Check every answer. Redo the ones you got wrong a day later.
  3. Work through past exam questions wherever you can.
  4. Note which question types keep coming back.
Open Test

Score on the real exam

63%
78%
Material only
reviewedMaterial practised
with questions

Same students, same course, same exam. The only difference was whether they had practised that material with questions beforehand.

4
Research Same hours, spread out Spreading study over days beats packing the same hours into one sitting, when you need to remember it later.
Flashcards

Spaced repetition

Memory fades fast after you first learn something. Each review brings it back and makes it fade more slowly the next time. Fifteen minutes of flashcards a day keeps every chapter you’ve done fresh until the exam.

  1. Review a little every day instead of a lot once a week.
  2. Answer before you flip the card.
  3. Keep old chapters in the mix until the exam.
Open Review
Learn once Spaced reviews