Teaching & Learning

The study habits that work (and the ones that only feel like they do) 

As a school, we're increasingly grounding our teaching in the "science of learning" - the large body of research into how memory actually works. Some of its clearest findings are about how students study, and they matter at home as much as in the classroom. The catch is that the most effective techniques often feel like the least productive, while the comfortable ones quietly do very little. 

Take the most popular study method of all: re-reading notes and running a highlighter over the page. It feels like progress - the material grows familiar and the page looks busy. But in a review of study techniques, Dunlosky and colleagues rated highlighting and re-reading as low utility: among the least effective strategies they examined. Familiarity, it turns out, is not the same as knowing. Recognising an answer when you see it is far easier than producing it when you can't. 

What the same research rates most highly is retrieval practice - closing the book and trying to recall the material from memory. In a well-known study, students who tested themselves on a passage remembered dramatically more a week later than students who simply re-read it, even though the re-readers felt more confident at the time. The act of struggling to remember is what strengthens the memory. At home, this is as simple as turning notes into questions: "Cover the page - now tell me what you remember," or a few quick questions over dinner. Low-stakes, no marks, just retrieval. 

The second high-value habit is spacing. An hour a night across six nights beats a single six-hour cram, even though the cram feels more virtuous. Spreading practice out forces the brain to reload the material each time — mild effort that pays off in lasting memory. Cramming produces a spike of performance that fades almost as fast as it arrived. 

Underneath both is a skill we're explicitly teaching: metacognition, or noticing what you do and don't yet understand. Re-reading is so seductive precisely because it hides the gaps. Self-testing exposes them - which is uncomfortable, and exactly the point. 

So if there's one change worth making at home this term, it's small: swap "read it again" for "close the book and tell me." It will feel harder. That's the sign it's working. 

Nash Clark 

Director of Teaching and Learning