Study methods that feel hard are often the most beneficial ways of learning
Most students study the same way: read the chapter, highlight the important parts, then reread the highlights before the test. This method feels productive but it's also one of the least effective methods available and memory research has known this for decades. The problem is that rereading creates familiarity, not retrieval. And we need to practice retrieval of information to actually remember things. When you reread a highlighted sentence, your brain recognises it and feels like it knows it, however when put to practice, a test doesn't ask ‘does this look familiar?’. Instead, exams would ask you to produce the answer from nothing. Therefore, rereading and highlighting as methods of studying are quite ineffective study practices.
There should be a shift towards retrieval practice, where you actively quiz yourself with flashcards or explain the concept out loud without notes. At first, the struggle to recall information is not a sign you're doing it wrong, it's the mechanism that strengthens the memory and ensures that you’re not rote learning. Interestingly, spacing when you learn this information matters just as much as retrieval. Studying a topic once for three hours the night before an exam builds weak, short-term memory compared to studying the same material in four thirty-minute sessions spread across a week. This strengthens your memory and facilitates its long term storage even if you feel slightly unproductive for forgetting and relearning this content. Moreover, the mixing of different topics or problem types in one sitting termed interleaving also outperforms the intuitive studying approach, even though it feels harder and less fluent in the moment.
Paradoxically, the common pattern is that the study methods that feel best while you're doing them (rereading, highlighting, blocked practice) are often the ones that work worst whereas the methods that feel effortful and uncomfortable are usually the ones building real memory.
