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Please thank Cal Newport for this guest post. I will be writing up a post at his blog, Study Hacks, very soon. Cal is also a successful author, with two books entitled: How to Become a Straight A Student, and How to Win at College.
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A Surprising Discovery
To research my second book I devised a simple plan. I would choose 50 students, all of whom had high GPAs, from a variety of schools and majors. Each student would besubjected to a tedious interview that extracts every last littledetail about their study habits.
My assumption was that each student would have his or her own custom-built toolbox of tactics. I would pick and present those that seemed most interesting.
But my assumption was wrong.
As I began to collect and review my interview material I kept stumbling across pieces of advice or strategies that appeared again and again. Even more unexpected, many of these repeat offenders were strategies I too had devised as part of my own academic turn around. I soon developed an astonishing theory: When it comes to making straight A’s, there seem to be a collection of universal laws— common strategies that almost any student who sets out to improve his or her performance will ultimately stumble upon. Like the laws of nature, they are fundamental.
One of the most prevalent of these straight-A laws, and arguably the most important, is the following:
The Quiz-and-Recall Method
Most students study using rote review. The method is simple. Collect all of your notes from both lecture and reading assignments, then read them silently to yourself, again and again, as many times as you can tolerate before you become overwhelmed by fatigue.
Conscientious students start a day or two in advance and are able to review everything several times. Less conscientious students wait until the night before — and are often still rote reviewing up to the literal last minute before the test. Indeed, the word “cram” can be defined as: “rapid rote reviewing.”
The straight-A students I interviewed did not do rote review.
In fact, they despised rote review because they could correctly identify its inefficiency. As any cognitive scientist will tell you, silent reading is a terrible way to retain material. Your mind wanders and the material is retained at an abysmally low rate.
Here is what straight-A students do instead:
1. They collapsed their notes into clusters which I call big ideas. It doesn’t really matter how they decide this grouping, it’s enough that clusters are somewhat consistent.
2. They assigned a one-sentence prompt for each big idea. For example: How do Gibbon’s ideas contrast with the scholars of the early 20th century?
3. For each prompt, they attempt to lecture out loud, as if talking to an imaginary class, the main points from the corresponding big idea. They do this without looking at their notes. If they are successful, they move on. If they had trouble, they put a checkmark next to the big idea.
4. After the first pass, they take a break, and then repeat, only focusing on the big ideas that got checkmarks. After this run-through, they repeat again, focusing only on the big ideas that still gave them trouble in the second pass. And so on.
5. This continues until they finish a pass with no checkmarks.
I call this the quiz-and-recall method. And it’s incredibly effective.
Two things to notice:
First, for some reason, lecturing out loud makes concepts stick in your mind. Once you explain an idea, it has a way of intertwining itself in your neural pathways, and refusing to let go. Once is enough— you’re going to remember that material. The same doesn’t hold true for rote review. You can read over a set of notes 10 times and still forget the important ideas by the next morning.
Second, by only focusing, on each pass, on the big ideas that gave you trouble in the previous pass, you’re eliminating wasted time. Ideas you are familiar with get a minimum of time. Tough ideas get the most time. In essence, you minimizing the time required to learn every last idea.
It’s Like Magic
Students who trust the quiz-and-recall method report that its effectiveness is almost eerie. A common experience for me, using this technique, is to sit down for an essay exam and find myself able to remember, almost word for word, arguments from lecture that I ingrained using q-and-r. Needless to say, the resulting essays (and grades) were strong.
This is a simple change. But it’s devastatingly effective. If you change just one thing about how you study, consider making the crucial switch from rote review to quiz-and-recall.
The Single Most Important Study Strategy You Will Ever Hear
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