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Will you study in an intensive block just before the exam? Or will you start soon and spread your study time out over a longer period?

All of these different techniques are commonly used by students to revise. Which ones work best for you? Make a note of the ones you use the most, and, as you read on, think about whether you need to try different techniques to help you to learn more effectively.

Study techniques: a few home truths John Dunlosky is an American psychology professor who researches student learning and achievement. He and his colleagues, all of whom are psychology or educational researchers, have reviewed the effectiveness of all of the different types of study activity listed in the activity box above, and have made some interesting findings (Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham, 2013), which we will explore here. Highlighting One of the most common study techniques is to highlight or underline text; most of us use this technique sometimes, to help us to identify the important messages that we need to remember, as we read. Looking at my own students’ work, I notice that some people highlight in just one colour, while others use different colours for different types of information, and that some students highlight lots of the text they are reading, while some only highlight small sections. It’s certainly a popular study technique! – and you might expect it to be quite effective. Highlighted text should focus your attention on the important information, and in choosing what to highlight (and possibly the appropriate colour), you must be engaging in elaborative processing, to identify what is important and what is not. This is a fairly easy technique to test experimentally, and a number of researchers have allocated students to different experimental groups to find out if they learn more when they highlight text (compared to reading text that has already been highlighted, or non- highlighted text). The results are fairly consistent; the majority of studies reviewed by Dunlosky et al. found that highlighting was no better for learning than simply reading the text. In one study, it was even found to focus students’ minds on concepts as independent of each other, and to reduce their ability to think about connections between them. It may be that some students highlight too much information, some of which is not important, which reduces the effectiveness of highlighting, but, generally, highlighting information does not seem to be a good way to learn. The best advice is probably not to waste too much of your time highlighting, and to try some of the other strategies we discuss here; if you do want to highlight text that you’re reading anyway, try to be very selective and only highlight very key points. Re-reading Highlighting is often used alongside another popular technique: re-reading of text books, articles or notes. If highlighting doesn’t enhance learning, what about reading something several times? Re- reading means that you are processing the same information several times, which might act as a form of rehearsal (repeating the same information, as you might if trying to remember someone’s telephone number), or it might be that you pick up on different concepts or notice more about the structure of the argument each time you read through the same material. So, does it work? The studies reviewed by Dunlosky et al. suggest that reading something twice is advantageous, especially if the readings are separated in time by a couple of days. However, the effects have only been measured for straightforward recall tasks, and it is not clear whether re-reading is an effective way

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