Effective Learning Techniques

It goes without saying that effective training requires effective learning. But how does one go about learning effectively both during and after a training session? Studies have been conducted to reveal the most effective techniques for retaining and incorporating information and instruction. You don’t have to be a student to benefit from techniques proven to be effective in a classroom; lifelong learners need to continuously adapt their methods … and learn how to learn.

Recite. Review. Remember.

Probably the most effective technique in learning is to test yourself on the material, according to an article reprinted by the American Psychological Association (APA). Ask yourself questions, retrieve the answers, restudy what you’ve missed, and test yourself repeatedly over time. Once you’ve received instruction on a topic, go back and recite everything that you can remember. Review the material to correct what you got wrong or to revisit important information that you overlooked, the article states. This methods works well because immediately reciting back the material illuminates what you had trouble understanding and remembering.

For information to stick, you need to process it until you understand it. Connecting new information to information you already know is another method shared by the APA. Still another is to use your imagination. Learners who visualize ideas remember them better than those who don’t.

Test yourself. Cover the definitions to terms in your notes and attempt to define them in your own words. Make further notes about anything that you can’t remember but wait to look up the answers. Then go back and review the material to see how well you knew the terms or answered the questions in your self-test.

At the end of an instruction session, read over your notes and summarize them in a page or two. Fill in missing definitions or phrases. This is another way to test yourself and can lead to getting at the heart of a course of instruction.

Practice Makes Perfect

Practice testing, or self-testing, scored high in a study on effective learning techniques published by the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Testing improves learning, the study states. Practice testing may involve flashcards or completing practice questions offered at the end of an instruction or in supplemental material. Testing can enhance retention by triggering elaborate retrieval processes that involve a search of long-term memory that in turn activates related information, says the study. Practice testing is said to be superior to note taking, imagery use, and unguided restudy.

The other technique that scored high in the APS study is known as distributed practice. Distributing learning over a period of time benefits long-term retention more than learning in a short period of time, or “cramming.” Learning over a period of days has been found to be superior to “massed practice,” or cramming everything into one session, and the benefit was greater following a longer lag between sessions than a shorter one.

Three techniques were scored as moderately effective in the APS study: elaborative interrogation (coming up with an explanation for why a fact is true), self-explanation (explaining how new information is related to known information), and interleaved practice (employing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of material). Highlighting text and rereading material does not consistently help learner performance, so these were given a low rating. Using keywords as a mnemonic device, employing imagery for text learning, and summarization also scored low, but some are difficult to implement in given situations or the conditions under which they are beneficial are limited.

Taking a long-term approach and testing yourself on the material can put you on the path to retaining information through any training session.