I remember my first all-nighter in college vividly. I was sitting at my small desk in my dorm room, surrounded by coffee cups and class notes. I thought that the more time I spent studying, the better prepared I would be for my final exam. However, the next morning, I was delusionally tired and yet somehow still woefully unprepared for the exam. I didn’t know it at the time, but my strategy of reading and rereading my class notes all night was not an effective way to learn.

Fortunately, there is research that points us in the right direction when it comes to learning. In their paper “Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology,” John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan, and Daniel T. Willingham break down the efficacy of ten different learning techniques depending on who’s doing the learning, what materials are required, and the specificity of the learning task.

According to the study, practice testing and distributed practice are the two most effective and useful learning methods, while elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, and interleaved practice fall into the moderately useful category. Other methods, such as summarization, highlighting and underlining, and rereading were found to have low utility.

Practice testing involves low or no-stakes testing by an instructor to check for mastery. It’s a formative assessment to see what students know and don’t know. The act of taking a test changes how the brain pays attention and stores information, and most people try much harder to retrieve information during a test. Mediators are what connect cues and targets, and practice testing seems to improve these mediators by helping the brain organize information better. In the study, participants remembered information 80% with practice testing as compared to 36% with reviewing the material.

Distributed practice involves scheduling study sessions with time in between each session. In the study, some people participated in six study sessions back to back. Others had a day between each session, and the final group had a month between each session. The group who binged the six sessions retained more information early, but the groups who took some time off ultimately retained more information. Another study showed that participants recalled 47% of information with spaced study versus 37% with mass study (cramming). Give yourself at least 24 hours between study sessions to allow your brain time to digest the information.

Elaborative interrogation involves prompting learners to generate an explanation for an explicitly stated fact. In the study, participants who were prompted to explain why each fact was so were 72% accurate, while the other two groups were 37% accurate. Elaborative interrogation appears to be effective because it activates people’s schemata, helps people situate new information within what they already know, and is more effective for people who know more about a topic.

Self-explanation involves explaining the principle behind something as you’re learning it. The idea is that explaining how something works helps learners transfer that principle to future problems. In the study, participants who were prompted to explain their work outperformed the group that didn’t when asked to take a transfer test that required knowledge of a similar principle.

Interleaved practice involves looping an old skill into a new lesson. For example, if you’re learning how to find the volume of a triangle, you could incorporate a question from the previous lesson on the volume of squares. In the study, interleaved learners performed 43% better than the block learners when asked to take a criterion test one week later that asked them to solve novel yet related problems.

Other methods, such as summarization, highlighting and underlining, and rereading were found to have low utility. Summarization involves writing summaries of text in your own words, highlighting and underlining involve marking important information in the text, and rereading involves reading the same material repeatedly. While these strategies may help in some cases, the study found that they were not as effective or useful as the other methods.

In conclusion, the methods of learning are more important than time spent learning – quality over quantity. Practice testing and distributed practice are the two most effective and useful learning methods. Elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, and interleaved practice fall into the moderately useful category. Other methods, such as summarization, highlighting and underlining, and rereading were found to have low utility. By understanding these effective learning techniques, we can work smarter and learn more efficiently.