5 Research-Based Studying Strategies for High School Students

While getting myself organized for the marathon of testing season, I took some time to review the self-reflection responses from my high school science students regarding how they had studied for their last exam. I found that, despite my encouragement to use active learning strategies, the majority of my students reported spending their time “rereading material” or “watching YouTube tutorials,” two things I explicitly told them not to do!

The study records of my students matched those of the research participants in the classic article “Five Popular Study Strategies: Their Pitfalls and Optimal Implementations,” by Toshiya Miyatsu and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis. As the authors state (and my students reiterated), despite what teachers know about effective learning strategies,“students do not report frequent reliance on these empirically supported techniques.”

Here are some insights from neuroscience literature about how students study, and how to study more productively, that I plan to use to guide students in preparation for this semester’s exams.

5 Studying Strategies—And How Students Can Use Them Effectively

1. Rereading. It feels so productive and satisfying to spend an hour paging through your prior learning, eyes skimming page after page. Unfortunately, passive reading, especially in the form of cramming the night before an exam, is not effective for long-term retention.

One technique to make reading more conducive to learning is to use spaced repetition. Revisiting material over time forces the brain to reconstruct knowledge, strengthening neural connections. You can see spaced repetition in the Duolingo app, which has periodic skills practice to “power up” your learning.

From a neuroscience perspective, spacing out your study aligns with how synaptic strengthening works. Each time students revisit content, those neural pathways get reinforced. Even more important, sleep plays a critical role in consolidating those memories. What will I share with my students about this? If you want to reread your notes, review a little every night and then let your brain rest.

2. Underlining and highlighting. I cannot count how many times I have seen a page of student notes covered in yellow highlighter. While highlighting can be helpful for identifying key information to review in the future, students, as novice learners, often do not have the skills or knowledge to be able to know what is important and what is not.

Teachers, as experts in their field, are able to see patterns and connections that students cannot. We must help guide students and model selective highlighting to teach students how to think like experts, not just attempt to memorize data. The visual and physical process of highlighting is helpful from a brain-based perspective, as the action helps build cognitive maps, mental frameworks that organize information.

3. Note-taking. Never assume that students know how to take notes. Students often copy notes verbatim rather than engaging in generative processes like summarizing key ideas. You must take time to teach students using structures such as Cornell notes or two-column notes to guide your novice learners in how to best organize information.

As for the question of digital versus physical note-taking, the research is still mixed, but neuroscience suggests that writing notes by hand engages more of the brain and leads to longer-term recall and higher-quality synthesis than typing out digital notes. Plus, handwritten notes help students avoid the temptations of digital distractions.

4. Outlining. Writing an outline instead of sentence-based notes is another popular strategy. Outlines organize information into a hierarchical structure and help to pull out key ideas. With outlining, much like with highlighting, the strategy becomes ineffective because students do not yet have the background knowledge to identify what the most important parts are.

To make the best use of outlining as a study technique, provide students with guided notes to help them assemble the pieces of material into a cohesive whole. The expert outline then allows students to organize a mental schema, much as machine-learning algorithms use neural nets and weighting to assign values to the importance of information and produce an answer for their users.

5. Flash cards. At last we come to flash cards, the old standard of studying. Flash cards are helpful for rote memorization, as they provide multiple opportunities to retrieve information and strengthen synaptic connections, but require only low-level processing on Bloom’s taxonomy. When teachers write learning objectives and structure exam questions, we usually aim for higher-level skills like analysis and generation, so memorizing terms for recall, while useful, is not effective preparation for this type of exam.

Coach students to use flash cards to build a foundation and use flash cards as a base to populate the mental schema they are constructing. While students often prefer blocking content by similar topics because the connections are obvious, mixing up content, a technique known as interleaving, helps make flash card study time more powerful by forcing the brain to discriminate between different topics. Interleaving also helps show where students have gaps in understanding and reduces the illusion of competence that comes with easy practice.

how should your students study?

Students often believe learning should be easy, but just as with physical training, growth happens under “desirable difficulty.” Studying should be hard work! This semester, in addition to adding in explicit instruction on note-taking, I provided scaffolded practice and guided the students to seek their own answers via experimentation and research.

These processes meant introducing strategies that feel harder at first, and uncomfortable for me as a teacher, but I know I can’t just give them the answers. Our students have to train at the mental gym, leaving behind the lightweight flash cards and taking up the barbells of active recall and synthesis instead.