- How often did you study hard, mastered your material during your study session, but could not recall it on the test?
- How is it possible to be fluent and know your subject almost by heart and not be able to recall it a stressful situation couple of days (weeks) later?
- Have you ever felt totally confident about a subject after reading it a couple of times but you couldn’t answer the question on the exam?
- Did you feel something was easy and intuitive while you were reading, re-reading, making notes and highlighting it, but writing an essay on this subject didn’t work out that well?
If you recognized any of the above situations, keep reading!
So many times we have thought we studied enough, and it felt so productive and easy, but did not yield the desired results. The sad truth we have to embrace is, that if it felt “easy” we probably didn’t learn. Research has shown that only the hard work, the uncomfortable feeling of struggling with something before understanding, permanently rewires our brains and creates neural pathways that are necessary to later recall the material and pass the exam.
The general, however counterintuitive rule of professional studying is, that the strategies which feel easy may work for other areas of your life, but are not effective when studying for professional exams. In the exam setting you have to be much more than “familiar with the subject”. You need to be able to actively retrieve the acquired knowledge in seconds and often under severe stress, to answer the exam questions.
DOs and DON’Ts for professional studying:
DO NOT RE-READ the subject until you feel comfortable and the material seems familiar. Re-reading is deceiving yourself. You create an illusion of being prepared, but do not practice retrieval of information. The same counts for highlighting and underlining the key concepts. It is a waste of your precious study time. Visual recognition of the text (which is what we are practicing when we are highlighting and re-reading the text) does not mean mastery. These passive techniques give us peace of mind, because we think we are learning, but in reality we are wasting time necessary for real studying.
INSTEAD PRACTICE EFFORTFUL ACTIVE RETRIEVAL of the learned material – in other words: quiz yourself. Only in this way do you check exactly what you know, but also what you don’t know and reveal your weaknesses that need some extra work. Testing yourself may be annoying and frustrating at the beginning, when you don’t score as well as you would wish, but this is the strategy that interrupts the process of forgetting. As unpleasant and unproductive as it may feel, it gives you the necessary reality check of your actual knowledge and is highly effective. Other ways of active retrieval are rephrasing the learned concepts in your own words and searching for your own examples of the studied problems.
DO NOT MASS PRACTICE. Massed practice is when you dedicate an entire learning session to a particular subject. During each session you repeat the content as many times as it takes to be fluent, set it aside as a mastered subject, then move on to the next subject for the next session. This gives the impression of fast progress – after all you mastered the subject at the end of the session, right? Wrong! You will forget it as soon as you mastered it in the first place and you will have to invest the same or more time and effort to learn it again during revisions. Massed practice may be the strategy to cram in a subject one day before a midterm exam, but there is no place for it when studying for professional exams.
INSTEAD INTRODUCE SPACED PRACTICE. Spaced practice consists of retrieving learned concepts spaced in time, repeating smaller portions of material more frequently at the beginning and increasing the time intervals between repetitions when the concepts are easily retrievable. You will perceive this method as slower and it will require more effort, but it is much more durable and teaches you to retrieve information quickly.
Spaced practice
The classical example of spaced practice is flash cards. When flipping through the cards they are sorted such that the well known cards are set aside and the focus is put on the ones that still cause trouble. Every mastered card joins the pile with the known ones, until there is nothing left in the difficult pile. In this system most of your time is spent studying the difficult concepts and the mastered cards are repeated less frequently just for maintenance.
Flash cards were my method of choice and I strongly recommend it. I used the paid version of the Quizlet platform, which enabled me to create my own digital flashcards with images and to share them with my study group. The spaced repetition system is embedded within the platform and the flashcards are presented for repetition based on the frequency of correct answers. Quizlet was my choice because it is extremely user-friendly, but there are many other programs and platforms for making digital flashcards which are using the spaced repetition system. To learn more about all the different options watch this video by Thomas Frank – effective studying enthusiast and blogger.
If you happen to be preparing for the ACVP exam and would like to have access to my set of flashcards that helped me pass the phase II exam in 2017, subscribe to my blog
and write me a message on study@prostudying.com, I will be happy to add you to my virtual classroom!Mix it up
Another thing that will increase your retrieval fluency before the exam is not only interspacing but also interleaving the topics you have to master, while you are quizzing yourself. Mix problem types and practice out of sequence. Abandon the “chapter structure”. After all, this is most probably how you will be tested on your professional exam. The exam will not have sections titled “questions from chapter 1, 2, 3 etc…” It will all be mixed up, so start practicing in this way.
Conclusions
- Avoid re-reading and massed practice
- Instead quiz and test yourself
- Mix up the material and practice out of sequence
- Analyze the missed questions and use them as corrective feedback
- Rephrase the learned concepts in your own words
- Space out your repetitions
- To facilitate use flash cards and flash card platforms like Quizlet
The general rule is: if it feels hard and effortful, it’s working, so embrace it, go the hard way and you will pass your professional exam in the first attempt!