What Are the Best Study Techniques? What the Research Says

What does the research say are the best study techniques?

If you only read one piece of research about studying, make it the 2013 review by John Dunlosky, Katherine Rawson, Elizabeth Marsh, Mitchell Nathan and Daniel Willingham, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The team examined ten techniques that students and adult learners commonly use and rated each one by how well the evidence supports it across different learners, materials and situations.

Two techniques came out on top as high utility: practice testing and distributed practice. Three were rated moderate: elaborative interrogation, self-explanation and interleaved practice. Five were rated low: summarisation, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery for text and rereading. That list is uncomfortable for most of us, because the low group contains exactly what we were taught to do at school.

The reason the low-utility techniques stay popular is that they feel good. Rereading a page makes the words familiar, and familiarity is easily mistaken for knowledge. Psychologists call this the fluency illusion. The high-utility techniques feel harder in the moment, which is part of why they work.

Why is testing yourself better than rereading?

Retrieval practice means pulling information out of your memory rather than putting it in again. In a widely cited 2006 experiment, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students either reread a prose passage or take recall tests on it. On delayed tests days later, the students who had tested themselves remembered substantially more, even though the rereaders had predicted they would do better.

There are three practical reasons this happens. Each successful recall strengthens the route back to a memory. Failing to recall something and then seeing the answer makes the correct answer stick better than simply reading it. And testing gives honest feedback, so you spend time on what you don't know rather than polishing what you do.

The mindset shift is simple to say and hard to live: you don't test yourself to find out whether you're ready, you test yourself to become ready.

• Cover your notes and recall the key points on a blank page, then check.
• Turn every heading in your textbook into a question before reading the section.
• Use flashcards properly: say the answer out loud before you flip the card.
• Do practice questions from week one, not just in the final week.
• Explain a topic aloud to a colleague or an empty room without notes.

How far apart should study sessions be?

Spaced practice means studying the same material across several sessions with gaps in between. For long-term retention, a few shorter sessions spread over a fortnight usually beat the same total time packed into one weekend. The gaps allow a little forgetting, and retrieving a memory that has started to fade strengthens it.

How long should the gaps be? A large 2008 study by Nicholas Cepeda, Edward Vul, Doug Rohrer, John Wixted and Harold Pashler found that the best gap depends on when you need to remember. For a test one week away, the ideal gap was roughly 20 to 40 per cent of that week. For a test a year away, it fell to about 5 to 10 per cent of the year. In other words, longer horizons allow longer gaps, though not in proportion.

The simplest practical version is an expanding schedule: review new material after a day or two, and every time you recall it well, wait longer before the next review. Struggle, and the topic comes back sooner. Flashcard apps such as Anki do this automatically. If you prefer to manage topics rather than individual cards, a spreadsheet that calculates the next review date from a confidence rating works well; that is how the planner in our Learn Anything Faster kit is built.

What are interleaving, elaboration and dual coding?

Interleaving means mixing different types of problem in one practice session instead of doing them in blocks. Textbooks usually end each chapter with problems on that chapter alone, so you always know which method to use. Exams don't tell you. Shuffling questions from several topics trains the skill of recognising what a problem needs. Expect practice scores to dip at first; that dip is part of the benefit.

Elaboration means connecting new ideas to what you already know. Two research-backed forms are elaborative interrogation, asking yourself why something is true, and self-explanation, talking yourself through each step of a worked example. A quick routine: why does this work, how is it similar to and different from something I know, when would I use it at work, and what goes wrong if someone ignores it?

Dual coding, an idea associated with the psychologist Allan Paivio, means combining words with visuals. You don't need to be artistic. Draw a timeline, a flowchart or a two-by-two grid from memory, then explain it in words. The Learning Scientists, a group of cognitive psychologists who share free materials for teachers and students, group these with retrieval and spacing as six core strategies for effective learning, alongside using concrete examples.

How should you take notes so they help you revise?

Most study notes are transcription: every word the trainer said, every bullet on the slide. They take hours and rarely help with revision because nothing in them makes you think. Better notes are brief, in your own words and designed to test you later.

The Cornell note-taking system, created by Walter Pauk, an education professor at Cornell University, does this by design. Each page has a wide notes column for the session, a narrow cue column where you add questions afterwards, and a summary band at the bottom. To revise, you cover the notes and answer the cues. The page becomes a self-test, which turns your notes into retrieval practice.

Cornell's own learning support pages also point to research suggesting handwriting can help memory more than typing on a laptop, largely because it forces you to summarise. If you type, deliberately write less and in your own words.

Does speed reading work?

Not in the way the adverts promise. A 2016 review led by Keith Rayner in Psychological Science in the Public Interest concluded that there is a trade-off between reading speed and accuracy. Readers can go faster, but comprehension falls, and the claim that you can double or triple your speed with no loss of understanding isn't supported. The most reliable route to faster, better reading is building vocabulary and language skill through practice.

What does save time is choosing the right depth for the purpose. Survey a chapter first using headings, summaries and figures. Skim context, scan for specific facts, and save slow, careful study for the sections your syllabus actually examines. Then close the book and recall what you read. Many professionals find that only a third of a textbook needs study-mode reading.

How do you build a study plan around a full-time job?

Plans fail when they're designed for someone with no job or family. A plan for a working adult has to bend without breaking. Start by fixing an exam date, listing every syllabus topic and estimating your total hours honestly, then divide by the weeks available to get a weekly target. Reserve the last two weeks for mock exams and review rather than new material.

Give every study slot two versions: an ideal session of 45 to 60 minutes and a minimum session of about ten minutes, such as clearing due flashcards. On bad days, do the minimum and count it as a win. Keeping the daily habit alive protects your spacing schedule far better than heroic weekend catch-ups.

Use short pockets of time, like commutes and lunch breaks, for retrieval, and save longer blocks for new, complex material and timed mocks. Track the hours you actually study, not the hours you planned, so you can adjust early. If you're consistently short of your target, move the exam date or narrow your focus rather than pretending.

How can you use AI tools to study without fooling yourself?

AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or your company's approved tool can be excellent study partners, or the most convincing fluency illusion ever invented. Asking an AI to explain or summarise a topic, then reading the answer, is just rereading with extra steps. Asking it to quiz you, question you Socratically and mark your own explanations puts you back in the hot seat, which is where learning happens.

Three rules keep it safe. Check anything examinable against official course materials, because AI tools can be confidently wrong. Don't paste confidential work documents or restricted course content into public tools. And follow your exam provider's rules: studying with AI is fine, using it in an assessment where it isn't allowed is misconduct.

How do you know when you're ready for the exam?

Feeling ready is not evidence. Sit a full-length mock under real conditions about six weeks out, and again every week or two after that. After each one, sort every wrong answer into one of four types: didn't know it, misread the question, chose wrong under pressure, or ran out of time. Each type has a different fix, from more retrieval on weak topics to underlining qualifiers like first, best and except.

Work out your average time per question, set checkpoints, and practise moving on when a question takes twice your average. In the final week, stop learning new material and focus on light review, logistics and sleep.

If you'd like a clearer picture of how you learn before you start, the AssessAll Learning Agility assessment is a useful baseline. And because most workplace learning happens on the job rather than in courses, Jobulary's explainer on the 70-20-10 model is worth reading when you turn your new qualification into a development plan.