Skip to content

How to study for exams - Evidence-based revision tips

2018-04-04 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 20:58 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Aimed at students, Evidence-based framing

Ali, a final-year Cambridge medical student, opens a series of evidence-based revision tips: citing Dunlosky's 2013 review, he calls rereading, highlighting and summarising inefficient, presents three studies showing active recall works best, and recommends Anki, closed-book notes and writing questions for yourself.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A new series of evidence-based revision tips and the plan of the video

  • ★★ Ali starts a new series of evidence-based revision tips, backing his exam advice with psychology studies on students. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali says nobody really teaches students how to study, so they go with what feels intuitively right. — 00:00:00

00:01:27 — Popular but inefficient techniques: rereading, highlighting, summarising

  • ★★ John Dunlosky (quoted): The 2013 review by Professor Dunlosky and colleagues rates rereading as low utility: cheap in time, but much less effective than other learning techniques. — 00:02:00
  • ★★★ Ali says rereading notes or textbooks improves retention somewhat but, compared with other techniques, is pretty much a waste of time. — 00:02:29
  • ★ Ali cites a 2016 paper finding repetitive reading the study strategy students listed most often, and most often as their first choice. — 00:02:58
  • ★★ John Dunlosky (quoted): Dunlosky's review rates highlighting and underlining as low utility: it does little to boost performance and may hurt higher-level tasks that need inference. — 00:03:28
  • ★★ Ali notes that arts subjects at GCSE, most A-level subjects and all undergraduate subjects require inference making, where highlighting may hurt. — 00:03:28
  • ★★ Ali says highlighting a book in different colours feels productive; the Dunlosky review calls highlighting a safety blanket for students. — 00:04:17
  • ★★ Ali has summarised and made notes nearly all his life and still does, but is trying to phase it out because the evidence for it is equivocal. — 00:04:46
  • ★★ John Dunlosky (quoted): Dunlosky's review rates summarisation as low utility: it can work for learners already skilled at summarising, but most need extensive training. — 00:05:15
  • ★★★ Ali concludes that making notes is probably wasted revision time; people who enjoy it can keep doing it, but not as an effective revision strategy. (hedged) — 00:05:44
  • ★★ Ali recalls school friends with beautiful notes in big chemistry folders who spent hours on a single topic and complained it was not going in. — 00:06:14

00:06:44 — Active recall and the Dunlosky review's verdict on practice testing

  • ★★ In a second-year medicine lecture before exams, Ali learned that highlighting and making notes were not efficient, which blew his mind. — 00:06:44

  • ★★★ Ali calls active recall (active retrieval, practice testing) by far the most important study technique: retrieving facts from the brain strengthens the connections. — 00:07:13 · active recall

    “active recall is by far the most important technique that you can and should be using”

  • ★★ Ali, who had assumed learning means putting things into the brain, says over 100 years of research show people learn far better by practising retrieval. — 00:07:42 · active recall

  • ★★ John Dunlosky (quoted): Dunlosky's review rates practice testing as high utility: it is not time-intensive and needs minimal training. — 00:08:12 · active recall

00:09:10 — Three studies: Spitzer 1939, Butler 2010, Karpicke and Blunt 2011; Make It Stick

  • ★★ Ali describes a 1939 study (Spitzer) in which students who took a practice test after studying did better a day or a week later than those who only studied. — 00:09:10 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali describes a 2010 study (Butler) in which students who took a practice test did significantly better on facts and concepts a week later than those who restudied. — 00:10:07 · active recall
  • ★★★ In Karpicke and Blunt's 2011 study, students who read a text once and then recalled it did better on factual and inference questions than those who read it four times or made a mind map. — 00:11:06 · active recall
  • ★★ In Karpicke and Blunt's study, students predicted that repeated study would work best and active recall worst, so intuition does not match the evidence. — 00:12:55 · active recall
  • ★ Ali finds it insane that active recall is not taught in schools more often. — 00:12:55 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali recommends the book Make It Stick, which names active recall and spaced repetition as the two most important study techniques. — 00:13:24 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali says his next video in the evidence-based revision series will be about spaced repetition. — 00:13:24 · spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali says active recall is not rocket science: almost anything that takes cognitive effort to retrieve what you have learned works. — 00:13:24 · active recall

00:13:41 — Strategies: Anki flashcards, closed-book spider diagrams, questions instead of notes

  • ★★★ Ali says the flashcard app Anki is really good for memorising particular facts; he used it a lot for anatomy and pharmacology. — 00:14:41 · Anki
  • ★★ Anki schedules each flashcard by how easy you rated it, using spaced repetition: an easy card may return in a day, a hard one in 10 minutes. (hedged) — 00:14:41 · Anki, spaced repetition
  • ★★ In his third-year psychology course, Ali used Anki to memorise paragraphs about studies, such as Karpicke and Blunt 2011, to drop into his exam essays. — 00:15:10 · Anki
  • ★★ A Cambridge medic friend of Ali's who gets a first every year uses Anki for nearly everything and now makes flashcards in lectures instead of notes. — 00:15:40 · Anki
  • ★ Ali says Anki is free on the web, while the iOS version costs a few pounds. (hedged) — 00:15:40 · Anki
  • ★★★ Ali recommends making notes with the book closed: learn a topic, close the book, write down all you remember, then open it and fill in what you missed. — 00:16:09 · active recall
  • ★★★ For his third-year psychology exams, his best ever, Ali made about 50 essay plans and memorised them over two months by drawing closed-book spider diagrams. — 00:16:38 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★★ Instead of making notes in lectures or from textbooks, Ali writes questions for himself (the Cornell note-taking method) and answers them when he revises. — 00:17:36 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali gave a talk on evidence-based revision about three years earlier, as a third-year student. — 00:18:06
  • ★★ After Ali's talk, a first-year medic friend revised only by answering the hundred-odd questions he wrote on the first-year syllabus, and came second in his year. — 00:18:35
  • ★★ Ali says the more brain power it takes to recall a fact, the stronger the memory connection seems to get. (hedged) — 00:18:35 · active recall
  • ★★ Ali tells students they may keep rereading, highlighting and making notes, but alongside should test themselves more and use spaced repetition. — 00:19:04 · active recall, spaced repetition

00:19:18 — Summary and sign-off

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: active recall · Anki

Also: interleaving · spaced repetition · University of Cambridge

Replied to by

← Previous: Pakistan Society Ball - Cambridge University medical student VLOG #28 · Next → Finding out my Foundation Year Jobs - Quick update