The Student Room Group

Study of best revision methods

I found this article online about a study of effectiveness of revision methods.

http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/assessing-the-evidence-for-the-one-thing-you-never-get-taught-in-school-how-to-learn

These were the results:

Elaborative Interrogation - Moderate Utility
Self-explanation - Moderate Utility
Summarization - Low Utility
Highlighting - Low Utility
The keyword mnemonic - Low Utility
Imagery use for text learning - Low Utility
Rereading - Low Utility
Practice testing - High Utility
Distributed practice - High Utility
Interleaved practice - Moderate Utility

There are some caveats to this though, the obvious being that everyone is different so some techiniques work better for some than they do others. However i thought it was interesting nonetheless and i agree with the practice testing and especially the distributed practice. I think spreading revision over a long time and spacing out revision is the way to go, cramming or going over something just once will be sure to make you forget it instantly. Also rereading was given a low utility but it also mentioned that if rereading is spaced out and repeated then the utility is greatly increased.

Thought id share this and see what people think about it
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