Step Away From the Highlighter

Does this sound familiar? Final exams start soon, and the pile of notes, highlighted textbooks and old exams has turned into a mountain.

To help students get through this intense study period, we asked experts to provide tips based on the latest research on memory and learning.

The experts: Daniel Willingham, psychology professor at the University of Virginia, and Michael Clump, associate psychology professor and chair of the Department of Undergraduate Psychology at Marymount University in Arlington County.

Their advice:

The worst way to study is simply to read over notes.

"It increases the student's sense of familiarity, but they don't learn it well enough to be able to produce it on an exam," Willingham said.

The key, he and Clump said, is to find ways to test yourself on information you're supposed to know. Devise test questions and answer them. Write a new outline for a body of material, trying to connect issues in new ways.

"You don't remember what you want to remember. You remember what you think about, and the way that you think about it determines the durability of the memory," Willingham said.

For students of certain ages, parents can play a role, too, Clump said. They should ask their children to explain what they learned in school, not just to recite what they did. Having students put lessons into their own words forces them to personalize the information, reorganizing the material into categories that make sense to them, all of which will make it easier for them to remember, he said.

Stop indiscriminately highlighting everything you think is important because it is virtually "worthless other than making your book beautifully yellow, pink and green," Clump said.

The problem, he said, is that highlighting is passive. Students underline three-quarters of a book and never really engage the material. The key is to take notes about the truly important things. A bit of highlighter color in a book can be useful, but no more.

Alternate subjects until two days before the first test, Willingham suggested. Then "study full-bore" each day for the next day's exam. "Cramming is not good for long-term retention, but it does help if you're taking the exam hours later," he said.

When studying during the days before the tests begin, study each subject in blocks, and take a break for a meal, a run or other activities, Willingham said. If you have two subjects that might get mixed up (for example, French and Spanish), separate your studies for those tests as much as you can.

Don't give up sleep, both said. You lose the ability to retain information and focus when you stay up to cram.

Next school year, study throughout the year so the material sinks in and you don't have to use catch-up strategies for final exams.

-- Valerie Strauss