Key points:
- Students deserve strategies to help them improve their academic achievement
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- See article: ChatGPT could be the ultimate educator’s toolkit
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At the end of each semester, students are left with a single grade to let them know how well they did in a course. They are not, however, often given strategies on how to improve those grades in the future.
In exploring many semesters of learning, a few novel strategies on studying techniques can be refined–and more importantly, implemented–for struggling students at any level. Fundamentally, improving student retention is essential, while performance can be equally enhanced. By offering students unique views on comprehension, spaced repetition, and implementation, educators can give students actionable items to improve both their grades and learning habits.
The most important topic for a student to understand for any course is the type of learning they are doing. For example, studying for an engineering final should look different than reviewing for a biology course. Courses like engineering or mathematics are generally application based, meaning that a student will be taught a topic, say the order of operations, and be asked to apply that topic to a problem set on homework and exams.
One of the best ways to study for these types of courses is practice problems. To give your students study resources, my suggestion would be to provide a few practice problems like test questions along with a brief explanation of how you came up with those problems–meaning which objectives are being tested by those questions. This allows the student to see what you’re looking for in your exam, and then develop their own questions in small groups. Ideally, you would give these problems a week prior to the exam, such as the Friday prior, to allow ample time for students to get together, complete the problems, and create their own to deepen their understanding not only of the content, but also exam expectations.
By contrast, reviewing for an English, biology, or history class may involve a much broader topic list, where major themes must be understood and be tested by questions that are much more open-ended. Studying for this style of exams is difficult, because they typically require more complex thinking on the exams. Lectures and homework will help the students prepare for such tests; however, a student may have difficulty guiding their individual studying outside the course.
I would propose to introduce students to the four-pass method as a means of preparation. This method is used widely by medical students to acquire deeper understanding on complex topics, increasing a student’s application abilities. In summary, the goal is to see course material four times prior to examination. Each pass is meant to explore the topic in more depth–first lecture, second individual note taking, third memorization of important details, and fourth detailed summarization. One of the goals of a pass-based system is to develop healthy studying habits with a more structured approach. An educator should be able to understand this system broadly and present the information to students with a goal of increasing a student’s repertoire of studying techniques.
While studying for specific courses can be structured to understand the information more efficiently, in terms of improving long-term memory, spaced repetition is king. Students should not be learning information simply to pass a test, as the best teachers find a way to imprint information deep into a student’s neural pathways. As the time between acquired information increases, there is an exponential decrease in memory. This gap can be bridged by focusing on information prone to be forgotten.
Because it is difficult to know when a student forgets details about a topic, the question is: When should a student revisit information? This is a fantastic question addressed by the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. Simply put, the graph explains the rate of memory loss over time. By utilizing this chart, a student or educator can plan when it is optimal to revisit material and, more importantly, maximize time via the imprinting of information. Utilizing a graph just to plan out your studying requires a lot of effort just to develop an effective system. Luckily for students and educators alike, there are many resources that already have this information refined, the gold standard being Anki. Anki is a flashcard-style app that utilizes spaced-repetition software to maximize student’s time. The pathway to utilize the app is for a student/educator to make their own flashcards, questions, or image occlusions and review them as the app suggests. While Anki is not great for first understanding the material, it is an amazing supplement to reviewing material, specifically if the amount of information to digest is quite large. For example, any medical student worth their salt knows and religiously uses this software to guide their reviews for board exams.
Educators teach students information on various topics throughout their career. Unfortunately, students are not often taught how to study for an exam, and even more rarely are taught how to study efficiently. Having actionable tasks in study planning, like a pass system, spaced repetition, or practice problem development, can help students of all ages develop effective study habits.
By introducing students to the topics discussed in this article, educators can help get struggling students back on the right track, or help exceptional students skyrocket their educational potential.
Sam Baule is a medical student at Marian University and a lieutenant in the US Army. He graduated in May 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Iowa.
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