Study skills

How to study effectively: what the research says works

By Studycamp · September 20, 2026 · 15 min read

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To study effectively, test yourself on the material instead of rereading it, and spread that practice over days or weeks instead of cramming. In a major review of ten popular study techniques, those two (practice testing and distributed practice) were the only ones rated high utility. The other steps below are supports, and their evidence is thinner or more mixed.

Key takeaways

Close the book and recall what you can from memory before you check your notes. In the studies below, it beat rereading on tests taken a week later.
Split your studying into several shorter sessions across days. Cramming feels productive and fades fast.
Rereading and highlighting are what most students do, and the review found they do not reliably help. Swap them for questions and recall.
If a method feels hard and a little frustrating, that is often a sign it is working. Smooth and comfortable often means you are only recognizing the material.
Sleep, a quiet phone, and a plan for the week help, but they are supporting acts. The core loop is study, close the book, recall, check.
Studycamp keeps that loop in one workspace: flashcards and quizzes from your own files, plus notes, a calendar, and a timer.

Why most students don't study effectively

Most students reread and highlight. A 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest looked at ten common techniques and rated each one's usefulness. Practice testing and distributed practice got high ratings because the benefits held up across learners of different ages and abilities. Rereading, highlighting, summarization, the keyword mnemonic, and imagery for text learning all rated low. The authors noted that most students report using rereading and highlighting, yet these do not consistently boost performance. They recommended practice testing instead of rereading (Dunlosky et al., 2013, Association for Psychological Science).

The trouble with rereading is not that it does nothing. It does something, and the something is misleading.

In a classic experiment, students read a prose passage and then either restudied it or tried to write down everything they remembered. Five minutes later, restudying won: 81% recall against 75%. One week later the result flipped. Students who had practiced recalling remembered 56% of the material, while restudiers remembered 42%. In the paper's second experiment, students who studied a passage four times in total recalled only 40% after a week, while students who studied it once and then recalled it three times recalled 61%. The four-times group had also predicted they would remember the passage better (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006, Psychological Science).

Rereading makes material look familiar, and familiar feels like known. You feel ready until the exam asks a question without showing you the answer.

A Harvard physics study found the same gap between feeling and learning in a lecture hall. Students taught with active methods scored higher than students taught by highly rated instructors giving passive lectures, but they rated their own learning lower. The lead author's explanation: "Deep learning is hard work. The effort involved in active learning can be misinterpreted as a sign of poor learning." (ScienceDaily summary of Deslauriers et al., 2019, PNAS). Plan for that. If your study session feels a bit uncomfortable, you may be doing it right.

One limit: these are mostly lab and classroom studies. They show what works on average, not what will work for you on Tuesday. Treat them as a strong default, then check on yourself (a simple way is near the end).

Step 1: Test yourself instead of rereading

Practice testing means pulling information out of your head instead of putting it back in. It is one of the two best-supported changes you can make. Our post on active recall covers the method in more detail. The short version follows.

A 2021 meta-analysis pulled together 222 classroom studies with 48,478 students. It found that quizzing raised achievement to a medium extent (Hedges' g = 0.499). The size of the benefit varied with things like whether students got feedback and how often they were tested (Yang et al., 2021, Psychological Bulletin). A separate review of 50 experiments in real schools and classrooms found that 57% showed medium or large benefits from retrieval practice. It also noted that only 6% of those experiments were run outside WEIRD countries (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic), so we know less about how well it travels (Agarwal, Nunes and Blunt, 2021, Educational Psychology Review).

The blank page method

Read a section, or a lecture's worth of notes, once.
Close everything.
On a blank page, write down everything you can remember. Definitions, steps, and examples all count. Give it five to ten minutes.
Open your notes and check. In a different color, add what you missed or got wrong.
The colored parts are your next study session.

That is close to the free-recall test used in the Roediger and Karpicke experiments above. It is also a decent version of what people call the blurting method.

Questions beat headings

If you prefer cards or quizzes, write the question the way an exam would ask it. A weak card says "Photosynthesis" on the front. A better one asks: "Where in the chloroplast do the light reactions happen, and what do they produce?" The answer: in the thylakoid membranes, producing ATP, NADPH, and oxygen. You can only answer the second card by retrieving something. The first lets you nod and flip.

Our guide on how to make flashcards covers the rules for good cards. In Studycamp you can upload slides or a PDF and generate flashcards or a multiple-choice quiz from them, then answer without looking.

Check your answers

If you never check, you cannot fix your mistakes. Compare against your source every time. That is why the blank page method has a colored-pen step.

Step 2: Spread your sessions over time

Distributed practice means the same total study time, spread across more days. Our suggestion: three 40-minute sessions across ten days, instead of one two-hour block on Sunday night. The studies below support the spacing, though not those exact numbers.

The evidence is deep. One meta-analysis reviewed 839 assessments of distributed practice across 317 experiments in 184 articles. It found that the gap between sessions and how long you need to remember the material work together: the longer you need to remember something, the longer the best gap between sessions gets (Cepeda et al., 2006, Psychological Bulletin). In plain terms, studying for a test next week calls for shorter gaps than studying for something you want to know in six months.

The practical version:

Study a topic the day you learn it, even for 15 minutes.
See it again a few days later. Then a week later. Then before the exam.
Each time, start with recall (the blank page), not rereading.

Studycamp has no review scheduler, so you pick the days yourself. Put them on the calendar and use the countdown to see how long you have until each exam.

If you want the full mechanics, including the Leitner box system, read our spaced repetition guide. For a schedule built around a specific exam date, see how to study for exams.

The catch: spacing feels worse while you do it. You forget some material between sessions and have to work to get it back. That effort is the point.

Step 3: Mix up problem types (when it fits)

Interleaving means switching between different kinds of problems or topics inside one session, instead of finishing a whole batch of one kind before moving on. Instead of ten problems on one formula, you do a mixed set, so you have to work out which method each problem needs.

A 2019 meta-analysis of 59 studies found a moderate overall benefit (Hedges' g = 0.42). The details matter, though. The benefit was clearest for visual material like paintings (g = 0.67) and small for math tasks (g = 0.34). For studies using words, blocking did better than interleaving (g = -0.39), and results for expository texts were ambiguous (Brunmair and Richter, 2019, Psychological Bulletin).

So this is a technique for the right subjects. Use it for math, physics, chemistry problem sets, or learning to tell similar-looking categories apart (say, types of rock or types of logical fallacy). Mixing up vocabulary lists is unlikely to help. A sensible rule of thumb: if a topic is brand new to you, learn it first, then mix.

Step 4: Take notes you can study from

Notes are input for your recall practice. A page of neat, complete notes that you only reread puts you back to rereading.

First, a 2024 meta-analysis of 24 studies (21 articles) found that college students who took and reviewed handwritten notes had higher achievement than students who typed (Hedges' g = 0.248), even though typing produced more notes (g = 0.919) (Flanigan et al., 2024, Educational Psychology Review). The effect is modest, so do not throw out your laptop. If you type, resist the urge to transcribe everything, and review the notes with questions.

Second, design your notes so they can be tested. The Cornell method does this on purpose: a narrow left column for cue questions, a wide right column for notes, and a summary at the bottom. Cover the right side and answer the cues. Our post on note-taking methods compares the Cornell, outline, mapping, and charting formats and says when each one fits. Studycamp's Notes include Cornell templates, and voice notes turn a recorded lecture into a transcript you can write questions from.

Step 5: Make sure you understand it, not just memorize it

Recall gets facts into memory. It does not tell you if you understand why they are true. For that, use the Feynman technique: pick a concept, explain it in plain words as if to a friend who has never heard of it, and notice where you stall or reach for jargon. Each stall marks something you may know less well than you thought.

Do it out loud or on paper, then return to the source only for the parts that broke down.

Step 6: Use AI and apps as helpers, not substitutes

Study tools can save time on the boring parts, like turning slides into questions. They cannot do the retrieval for you. The risk is the same as with rereading. A neat AI summary is easy to read and easy to nod along with, which is exactly the feeling the research above warns about. That is an inference from the studies above, not a finding about AI summaries specifically, so test yourself on the summary afterward instead of assuming it worked.

A good use of any tool is to turn your own course material into questions and then answer them without looking. In Studycamp you can upload lecture slides or a PDF, and generate flashcards and multiple-choice quizzes from that file, with explanations after each answer. The AI chat answers questions about your own files and cites the passages it used, so you can check it against the source. A summary is fine for a first pass, as long as you close it and recall afterward. For a broader look at what is out there, see our roundup of AI study tools. If you are deciding where to keep your flashcards, Quizlet alternatives compares the options fairly, including when Quizlet or Anki is the better fit.

Step 7: Protect your attention and your sleep

None of the techniques above work well if you are half-watching something else.

Session length. The University of North Carolina's Learning Center suggests studying in 30 or 45-minute sessions with breaks, and spreading study across several short periods over days and weeks (UNC Learning Center, Studying 101). A timer helps you hold to that, and Studycamp has a Pomodoro timer and ambient sounds if you want them.

Your phone. The popular claim is that even having your phone in view drains your brain. The evidence is weaker than the headlines. A 2024 meta-analysis of 56 studies and 7,093 participants found only one statistically significant effect (on working memory capacity), null results for sustained attention, response inhibition, and fluid intelligence, and noted poor statistical power and a lot of variation between studies (Parry, 2024, Media Psychology). Sitting there silently is not clearly the problem. Notifications and actually picking it up are a different matter, and easy to fix. Put it in another room or turn on Do Not Disturb.

Background sound. A 2025 meta-analysis of 32 studies (124 experiments) on distractions during digital reading found a clear hit to comprehension (Hedges' g = -0.64). Television and music showed the largest effects, both reported at g = -0.82, though the confidence interval for music was wide (-1.54 to -0.10) (Shen, 2025, Frontiers in Psychology). If you like some sound while you work, a steady, lyric-free track is a reasonable thing to try. Then test yourself on what you just read. The research above does not show whether ambient sound helps, only that TV and music hurt digital reading, so judge by your own recall results.

Sleep. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends 8 to 10 hours for teens aged 13 to 17 and 7 or more hours for adults 18 to 60, and lists better attention and memory among the benefits of adequate sleep (CDC). An all-nighter is the opposite of spaced practice, and it trades away the sleep the CDC ties to attention and memory.

A sample week for one chapter

This is an example plan, not a research-derived formula. The research says to space and to test. The exact days are yours to move.

Day	What you do	Time
Mon (lecture day)	Read your notes once, then do the blank page. Mark gaps. Write 8 to 10 exam-style questions	40 min
Tue	Answer yesterday's questions from memory. Check answers. Re-study only the gaps	25 min
Thu	Blank page again, no notes. Then explain the hardest idea out loud (Feynman)	30 min
Next Mon	Mixed set: questions from this chapter plus the previous one	40 min
Week 3	Two timed practice sessions on past papers or your own questions. Finish with the blank page	2 x 45 min
Night before	Skim your gap list. Stop early and sleep	20 min

Every session starts with recall, not rereading. After the first session, each one targets only the gaps from the one before. For a full exam plan, see how to study for exams.

For a countdown plan built around a specific exam date, use the 7-day exam plan.

How to tell if your method is working

Do this after each unit. It takes ten minutes.

Write down what you think you know about the topic, with no notes.
Answer five questions you did not write yourself (old exam questions, textbook end-of-chapter questions, or a friend's questions).
Compare your score to how confident you felt beforehand.

If you felt 90% ready and scored 60%, that gap is your most useful data. It shows where feeling and ability part ways. Aim your next session at those topics. It also guards against the pattern in the Roediger and Karpicke experiments, where students who restudied felt more confident and remembered less.

Common mistakes

Cramming the night before. It gives short-term familiarity and little else.
Switching methods every week. Give one a few weeks before you judge it.
Skipping the check. If you never compare against the source, you never fix what you got wrong.

FAQ

What is the best way to study?

The best-supported way is to combine practice testing with spacing: quiz yourself from memory, then repeat over several days. In the 2013 review of ten techniques, those two were the only ones rated high utility. Pair them with sleep, a single focus, and checking your answers.

How many hours a day should I study?

There is no research-backed universal number. The UNC Learning Center suggests 30 to 45-minute sessions with breaks, and daily short review of each class rather than one long block. Recall quality is a better guide than hours. If you can answer questions about the material without notes, you have studied enough for now.

What is the fastest way to memorize things?

Retrieval practice, done in spaced rounds. Try to recall the material, check what you missed, wait, and try again. Restudying wins in the first few minutes but loses after a week in the Roediger and Karpicke experiments, so it is a poor choice if you need to remember anything past tonight.

Is it better to study alone or in a group?

A group can work if you use the time to test each other. A group session where everyone reads notes together is rereading with company. A group session where you quiz each other and explain ideas is retrieval and Feynman practice. We did not find strong evidence in the sources above for one over the other, so pick what keeps you honest.

Does listening to music help you study?

It depends. A 2025 meta-analysis found television and music were linked to the largest comprehension drops during digital reading. If you use music, keep it steady and lyric-free, then check that your recall scores hold up. If they drop, turn it off.

Put the routine in one place: Studycamp

The steps above need several tools, and juggling five apps is a good way to quit by week two. Studycamp covers each step in one place, built from your own course files.

Test yourself. Generate flashcards to flip and shuffle, or a quiz with explanations after each answer.
Space your sessions. You choose the review days. Put them on the calendar and count down to exams with the countdown.
Take notes. Write in Notes or record a lecture with voice notes.
Understand it. Ask the AI chat about your own files, or read a summary with key points and terms.
Focus. Run the Pomodoro timer and turn on ambient sounds if they help you.
Keep courses apart. Use one workspace per course.