njbrown.com

Study techniques ranked best to worst

From a reasonably successful student.

I'm a reasonably successful high school student—1550 SAT, 3.9 GPA—so I figured I'd share my thoughts on the best/worst study techniques. It's worth considering how often you use each technique and modifying your behavior if you use too many inferior study techniques.

active vs. passive learning

My favorite analogy: imagine you're in the cockpit of a plane. The best pilot in the world will talk you through an entire plane flight from JFK–LAX. In fact, he'll talk you through 1000 flights. He's a great teacher, so you'll learn tons. The only caveat is that you're never allowed to touch anything.

Would you feel confident in flying the plane after those 1000 flights? Hell no!

Why not? You haven't actively participated in flying the plane. You could passively know everything there is to know about flying planes, but it all means nothing if you've never actually tried to fly the plane.

This is why passive learning techniques:

are strictly inferior to active learning techniques:

general rule of thumb

There's a huge library of learning science out there that supports my thesis that active learning techniques > passive learning techniques. As a fundamental argument, I suggest that active learning techniques are more effective because they force your brain to engage more with the content. Even more simply: you have to think harder about what you're learning.

I find practice questions / practice tests to be the gold standard for my own studying. No other technique is as efficient.