Effective Study Techniques: Active Recall vs. Passive Review for Better Retention (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So an interesting question is, what's the right way to actually study? You've received this information, you received it in class, you've taken notes. Now how do you study it when you have, for example, an exam coming up? A big mistake students make is basically reviewing passively this material again and again, or seeing if they can just regurgitate it from memory. This is actually a terrible way to actually review and remember information for a test. If you find yourself highlighting notes or reading over notes or textbook quietly, silently to yourself, you're doing something wrong. You are studying inefficiently. Now if you study students who get really high grades, you find they approach the task of studying in a completely different way. They approach studying as if they are a professor themselves. When they want to learn material, the way they learn it is that they lecture it out loud using complete sentences as if talking to a classroom full of students. They see if they can explain the concept articulately and do so without peeking at their notes. Because if you can do this, if you can explain a concept out loud, teach it to someone, that means you really understand it. And that's actually the most effective way to cement information in your head. Now it's hard. It's harder to actually explain, say, a math problem from scratch and go through the steps on a chalkboard. It's harder to do that than it is to just read over the example in the textbook. But if you do it once, then the information will be cemented. So this is the trade-off we often see. It requires more cognitive resources to study in this active recall sort of way. But it takes way less time because if you can get through a topic once out loud, you will remember it, whereas if you're doing passive review, you might have to read over something a dozen times before it slowly starts to stick. So avoid passive review and always turn towards active recall, active teaching, as the best method for actually reviewing and learning information.