How to Study for a Test: The Techniques That Work, Ranked by Research

To study for a test, quiz yourself from memory and spread your study over several days. Those two habits, practice testing and spaced practice, have the strongest evidence of any common study technique. Rereading your notes and highlighting feel productive but rank near the bottom.

Study techniques ranked by the evidence

In 2013, five psychologists reviewed the research on ten techniques students use and rated each one by how well its benefits held up across ages, subjects and types of test (Dunlosky et al., 2013).

Low doesn't mean useless. It means the benefits were small or showed up only with certain materials. The problem is that rereading and highlighting are what most students spend their time on.

Why rereading feels like it works

Rereading makes the material feel familiar, and familiar feels like learned. In one experiment, students either reread a passage or took recall tests on it. Five minutes later, the rereaders remembered more. Two days and one week later, the students who had tested themselves remembered much more, even though the rereaders felt more confident (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).

That's the trap with cramming: it works for the next few minutes and fades before the test.

How to study for a test, step by step

1. Find out what the test covers and its format. Multiple choice, problems and essays need different practice.
2. Turn your material into questions. Write flashcards, use the questions at the end of each chapter or get past exams.
3. Answer from memory before you look. Say or write the answer, then check it. Keep a pile of the questions you missed.
4. Spread your sessions over days. In a study with more than 1,350 people, the best gap between first learning and review was about 20 to 40% of the time left until a test one week away, and a smaller share for tests months away (Cepeda et al., 2008). For a test in a week, that's a review roughly every two days.
5. Mix problem types. For math, physics or chemistry, shuffle different kinds of problems instead of doing ten of the same in a row. Students who practiced mixed math problems scored far better on a test a week later than students who practiced one type at a time (Rohrer & Taylor, 2007).
6. Explain the hard parts in plain words. If you can't explain an idea without your notes, you've found what to study next. The Feynman technique turns this into a routine.
7. Do one timed practice test under exam conditions: no notes, a clock and your phone out of the room.

An example 7-day plan

Example for a test on day 8. Adjust it to your subjects and hours.

The days off are part of the plan. The spacing research compared the same sessions bunched together or spread apart, and spread apart won.

Keep your phone out of the room

In a set of experiments with nearly 800 people, those with their phone on the desk scored worse on memory and reasoning tasks than those who left it in another room, even when it was face down and silent (Ward et al., 2017). A later preregistered replication found no difference (Ruiz Pardo & Minda, 2022), so the effect of the phone just being there is uncertain.

What isn't uncertain is the interruption. A notification in the middle of a quiz round breaks the session, and "just checking" often turns into twenty minutes. Put the phone somewhere you can't reach it, or lock the apps that pull you in for the length of the session. If that's a daily fight, our guide on how to stop phone addiction covers the setup changes that work.

Lock distractions while you study

LockTy locks the apps you choose by schedule or when you arrive at the library. You can also set daily goals, like time reading, that unlock your apps once you meet them.

Get

Common mistakes

• Rereading until the notes look familiar. Familiar isn't the same as being able to recall it under pressure.
• Highlighting whole pages. If everything is marked, nothing stands out. Turn the key points into questions instead.
• Only quizzing what you already know. Keep the missed cards in play until you get them right on a later day.
• One long session the night before. It helps for the next morning at best. Several shorter sessions hold up better.
• Studying with the phone on the desk. Move it before you sit down, not after the first interruption.

If you're still struggling

If you study this way and still can't keep up, talk to your teacher or school's learning support. Problems with attention, reading or test anxiety are easier to deal with once someone looks at them directly.