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both involve re-organising material and identifying key messages from a wide range of information. You would imagine that they involve lots of elaborative processing! Likewise, actively questioning the material you are reading, asking yourself ‘why?’ as you encounter new information, is highly elaborative (Dunlosky names this approach ‘elaborative interrogation’), because it requires you to think about how the new information can be explained in the light of the other knowledge you possess. However, Dunlosky et al.’s findings on using these three techniques are somewhat mixed. It seems that if you write short summaries, or explain your ideas to a friend, or ask yourself questions as you read, you can learn better, but only if you do it well! If you decide to try these techniques for yourself, it might be worth working with a friend who is studying the same materials, and giving each other some feedback on how well you have completed the tasks. Practice testing Dunlosky et al. also identified some techniques that seem to help learning very reliably, so it is worth trying to incorporate them into your study habits. One such technique is practice testing; in other words, testing yourself on the topic you are learning, perhaps using online quizzes (which might be provided by your tutor), questions or activities in textbooks, flashcards, mock exams, or even working with your friends to test each other. The benefits of practice tests have been found reliably for over a century, aiding both factual recall and deeper understanding, and seem to occur because they help us to organise information. It seems that retrieving information from memory, through testing, rather than simply trying to store it there by studying the same material repeatedly, helps us to remember more information, to remember it for longer, and to remember it more accurately. The benefits of practice testing are even better if the tests are spaced out in time, with the more space between tests the better. So, testing yourself, asking your friends to test you, or finding questions to answer from other sources, is a great idea to improve your learning, especially if you test the same knowledge more than once, a few days or, preferably, weeks apart. Have you worked through the questions at the end of this chapter? I included them (and the regular activities within the chapter) because you can use them to test your own understanding, as you study. If your tutor provides practice quizzes or past exam papers for you, do make use of them, even if they are not marked! Distributed practice Spacing out your study is something I’ve mentioned twice now: first when I wrote about re-reading, above, and now here, thinking about practice testing. Dunlosky calls this the distributed practice effect; he suggests that the larger the gap between study sessions, the harder you have to work to process the information again, which consolidates your learning. He also suggests that each time you study the same material again acts as a reminder, causing you to retrieve the learning you did previously, and as we saw above, when talking about testing, retrieving a memory seems to aid its recall later. Dunlosky proposes that the optimal spacing between study episodes is 10-20% of the time for which you need to remember the material. So, if you have an exam in ten days’ time, space your study sessions so that they are one to two days apart, but if your exam is in three weeks’ time, space them two to four days apart. However, in psychology, many of the concepts we study in the first year of a university degree are important again the following year. For example, if you learned about measures of central tendency (means, variance, standard deviation and similar) early in your course, you are likely to need to understand them again later when you encounter more advanced statistics. If you hope to remember what you learned in a year’s time, you need to re-study the materials with a month or two between your study episodes! Interleaving Just as separating out your study episodes in time can help your learning, separating out the types of material you are learning about can also help you to remember more information, more accurately

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