Feel-good study methods don’t work. The best data points to five active strategies as the most effective ways to build lasting knowledge. Teach these methods and we empower all our students to become more effective learners, says Dr. Curtis Chandler.
A MiddleWeb Blog
Memory can feel like a fleeting thing. We walk into a room and forget why we’re there, tell the same story twice to the same person, or, as I once did, even place the ice cream in the pantry by accident.
These common “cognitive clogs” are frustrating and highlight a core challenge we face as educators. We spend hours crafting lessons, only to see the knowledge and skills often disappear from our students’ minds just as quickly as they were taught.
The good news is that decades of research have identified specific, effective techniques for helping students learn new information and remember it for the long term.
Instead of relying on a single study or a popular teaching trend, we can look to the most reliable findings from meta-analysis – a research method that combines and statistically analyzes the results of many individual studies on the same topic. This process gives us a big-picture, more trustworthy view of what actually works.
Ultimately, the most important takeaway is this: effective learning is less about what students study and more about how they study. The most reliable data points to active, “high-yield” strategies as the most effective ways to build lasting knowledge. By teaching these research-backed methods, we empower all our students to become more effective learners.
Moving Beyond “Feel-Good” Strategies
Many of the strategies students gravitate toward are among the least effective. These include rereading, highlighting, reviewing notes, and summarizing. While these approaches feel productive, research paints a different picture of how study time should be spent. Two separate, large-scale studies identified five common, high-yield study strategies for teachers and students to utilize: practice testing, distributed practice, elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, and interleaved practice (Dunlosky, 2013; Donoghue, 2021).
1. Practice testing, also known as retrieval practice, involves actively retrieving information from memory. This process does more than just access knowledge; it fundamentally strengthens it, making the information easier to access in the future. In short, the simple act of trying to remember something is one of the best ways to learn and retain it.
Some examples of how to implement practice testing include:
• Brain Dumps: After a lesson, ask students to take out a blank sheet of paper and write down everything they can remember about the topic for three to five minutes. Then, provide students with a concise, but comprehensive list, outline, or visual to compare their “Brain Dump” to. Doing so encourages retrieval and helps students identify knowledge gaps.
• Flashcards: Provide (or have students create) flashcards of key terms/concepts. Instead of just looking at the front and back of a flashcard, encourage students to recall the information on the back from memory before flipping it over.
• Low-Stakes Quizzes and Exit Tickets: Teachers can begin or end a lesson with a brief quiz on recently taught concepts. The goal isn’t to provide an actual grade, but rather to reinforce learning. Regularly mixing in older material from past lessons helps students practice retrieving information from long-term memory, which strengthens their recall.
• Self-Quizzing from Notes: Instead of passively re-reading notes, teach students to cover them up a section at a time and quiz themselves, only checking when stuck. This strategy places students in charge of their own learning and allows them to struggle a bit before checking their answers. This productive struggle is what strengthens memory and helps students pinpoint what they still don’t know.
• Using AI as a Retrieval Practice Study Buddy: Invite students to copy and paste their class notes, slides, or reading into ChatGPT or Gemini, then choose and enter one of these retrieval practice prompts into AI.
2. Distributed practice, sometimes called the “spacing effect,” involves spreading study and review sessions out over time. Cramming before a big exam may feel effective in the short term, but research consistently shows that information studied in a single sitting fades quickly. Students who spread out their study sessions over multiple days allow the brain to consolidate information, strengthen neural pathways, and reduce forgetting.
Some examples of distributed practice include….
• Spiral Reviews: Instead of reviewing content with students once before a test, revisit key concepts in short bursts across several days/weeks. Encourage students to do the same in their own study sessions.
• Daily Warm-Ups: Begin class with three questions – one from yesterday’s lesson, one from last week, and one from last month.
• Study Calendars: Teach students to create a study schedule that spreads their review out across several days rather than saving everything for the night before an exam.
• Digital Tools for Distributed Practice: Encourage students to explore/use tools such as Anki and Memrise with built-in spaced practice features or something simpler like Quizlet, which could be used in conjunction with a study calendar to review concepts at planned time intervals.
• AI-Assisted Review: Ask students to paste past notes into ChatGPT or Gemini and request a spaced practice quiz that mixes old and recent vocabulary, concepts, and skills.
3. Elaborative interrogation strengthens learning by prompting students to ask, “Why is this fact true?” or “Why does this make sense?” This pushes them to connect new information to what they already know, creating a richer network of understanding. This approach works best when students already have some prior knowledge to draw from.
Some examples of how to implement elaborative interrogation include the following:
• Why Prompts: After presenting new information, ask students to generate one or two “why” explanations that link it to prior knowledge. For example, in a science lesson after teaching that plants have a waxy coating, teachers can ask, “Why would a plant’s leaves need to have a waxy coating?” This prompts students to connect the new fact to their prior knowledge about water, evaporation, or sun exposure.
• Partner Explanations: This strategy boosts learning by having students explain a concept to a peer. The process of verbally teaching requires them to retrieve information from memory and organize their thoughts, which deepens their understanding and helps them spot knowledge gaps.
• Concept Mapping: Concept mapping is a visual strategy helps students practice elaborative interrogation by forcing them to identify and explain the connections between ideas. For instance, a student mapping out “photosynthesis” would link related concepts like “Sunlight” and “Carbon Dioxide” to the main idea. They would then label the connecting lines with phrases like “provides energy for” or “is absorbed by,” which forces them to think deeply about the why and how each part relates.
• Elaborative Interrogation Practice with AI: Teachers/students can use AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to act as a personal tutor, quizzing students with “why” questions to push them toward deeper thinking. This strategy helps students move beyond simple recall to connect facts with their underlying meaning. Here are some examples of prompts students could use.
4. Self-explanation is an active learning strategy where students either (a) explain the steps in a problem or (b) describe how new information relates to what they already know. This process forces them to articulate their reasoning, which in turn helps them identify gaps in their understanding and correct misconceptions.
Here are some examples of how to implement self-explanation:
• Think-Alouds: After solving a tricky math problem involving fractions or percentages, ask a student to verbally walk through their reasoning. This helps them articulate the process and allows the teacher to pinpoint where a misconception might be.
• Step Journals: Similar to think-alouds, this strategy asks a student to keep a running log of “how I solved it” steps for problems in subjects like science or math. This encourages them to write out the logic behind their solutions, such as: “First, I measured the soil, and here’s why that step was important…”
• Connection Writing: Prompt students to write a few sentences explaining how a new lesson connects to a previous one. For example, after learning about the three branches of government, a student could write, “What we learned about the legislative branch today connects to the Constitution we studied last week because…”
• Teach a Friend: Pair students and have one explain a new concept to the other. The act of teaching requires a deeper level of understanding, forcing the student to process and organize the information in a clear, logical way.
• AI Self-explanation Practice: As with other strategies, teachers can help students use AI to practice and receive feedback as they articulate their reasoning, explain the steps in a problem, or describe how new information relates to their prior knowledge. See these examples of prompts for students to use.
5. Interleaved practice (or interleaving) involves mixing up different types of problems or concepts within a single study session, rather than focusing on one topic at a time. Although this approach may feel less efficient, research shows it leads to stronger long-term retention and a deeper understanding of how concepts relate to and differ from one another.
Here are some ways to get started with interleaving:
• Use AI to “Shuffle” It Up: Students can use AI tools like Gemini or ChatGPT to create their own mixed-up practice tests by copying and pasting notes from different subjects into AI and asking for a quiz that combines (and mixes up) everything. This is a super-easy, efficient way for them to practice interleaving on their own.
• Mix Up Homework: Instead of giving students all the same type of problems on a worksheet, mix them up. For example, a math homework sheet could have a word problem, then a fraction problem, then a geometry question. This makes students think about which “tool” to use for each problem, just like they will on a test.
• Shuffle Flashcards: If your students use flashcards, tell students to shuffle all their flashcards for a test together – not just the ones from the newest unit or chapter. This forces them to quickly remember information from different lessons, which is great practice for a test.
• Throw in Old Questions: Add a few questions from previous lessons to daily warm-ups, exit tickets, or quizzes. This keeps old information fresh in students’ minds. For instance, in a history class, you could ask one question about yesterday’s lesson on the Civil War and another question about the American Revolution from last month.
A Call to Action
The research is clear: while strategies like rereading notes or highlighting may feel comfortable, they don’t do much to help students truly remember what they’ve learned. Decades of studies show that a small set of strategies – like retrieval practice, spacing out study sessions, elaboration, self-explanation, and interleaving – are far more effective. These approaches aren’t flashy, but they consistently lead to stronger learning and longer-lasting retention.
As educators, our role is to help students move beyond what “feels” effective and guide them toward what actually works. By weaving these strategies into our lessons, we ensure that the time and effort both we and our students put into learning pays off. Using research-based methods isn’t just about good teaching – it’s about making the most of every moment in the classroom and setting our students up for long-term success.
References
Donker, A. S., De Boer, H., Kostons, D., Van Ewijk, C. D., & van der Werf, M. P. (2014). Effectiveness of learning strategy instruction on academic performance: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 11, 1-26.
Donoghue, G. M., & Hattie, J. A. (2021, March). A meta-analysis of ten learning techniques. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 6, p. 581216). Frontiers.
Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public interest, 14(1), 4-58.
Melby-Lervåg, M., & Hulme, C. (2013). Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review. Developmental psychology, 49(2), 270.
