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Often when we meet with students who are struggling in this course (and other courses) – we discover that they are using ineffective study strategies. Highlighting text, re-reading, and memorizing flashcards are NOT effective study strategies! They are passive activities that do not help us truly learn and understand a topic. Many of us were successful in high school using these strategies – but these will not work in most college classes.

The six strategies that the Learning Scientists focus on are evidence-based. This means that experiments involving learning strategies have shown that these strategies work to improve student comprehension of the material.

These 6 Strategies Include

1. Spaced Practice: Start planning early for exams and set aside a little bit of time every day. Five hours spread out over two weeks is better than the same five hours all at once.
• How to do it: Review information from each class, but not immediately after class. After you review information from the most recent class, make sure to go back and study important older information to keep it fresh.
2. Retrieval Practice: Put away your class materials and write or sketch everything you know. Be as thorough as possible. Then, check your class materials for accuracy and important points you missed.
• How to do it: Take as many practice tests as you can get your hands on. If you don't have ready-made tests, try making your own and trading with a friend who has done the same. You can also make flashcards. Just make sure you practice recalling the information on them and go beyond definitions by thinking of links between ideas.
3. Elaboration: Ask yourself questions while you are studying about how things work and why, and then find the answers in your class materials and discuss them with your classmates.
• How to do it: Make connections between different ideas to explain how they work together. Take two ideas and think of ways they are similar and different. Describe how the ideas you are studying apply to your own experiences or memories. As you go through your day, make connections to the ideas you are learning in class.
4. Interleaving: Switch between ideas during a study session. Don’t study one idea for too long.
• How to do it: Go back over the ideas again in different orders to strengthen your understanding. Make links between different ideas as you switch between them. (But hold on! While it’s good to switch between ideas, don’t switch too often, or spend too little time on any one idea; you need to make sure you understand them).
5. Use Concrete Examples: Collect examples your teacher has used and look in your class materials for as many examples as you can find.
• How to do it: Make the link between the idea you are studying and each example, so that you understand how the example applies to the idea. Share examples with friends and explain them to each other for added benefits.
6. Use Dual Coding: Look at your class materials and find visuals. Look over the visuals and compare to the words.
• How to do it: Look at visuals and explain in your own words what they mean. Also, take information that you are trying to learn, and draw visuals to go along with it.