Shadowing Practice: How to study for exams - Evidence-based revision tips - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
1
Hey guys welcome back to the channel.
2
If you're new here my name is Ali.
3
I'm a final year medical student at Cambridge University
4
and today we're kicking off a new series where I'm going to be sharing with you evidence-based revision tips.
5
So I'm going to be giving you advice on how you can prepare for your exams
6
but hopefully I'll be backing up everything I say with evidence from studies
7
that have been done in the field of psychology on students like you and me over the last hundred years.
8
No one ever really teaches us how to study.
9
We tend to just go with what feels intuitively right.
10
And as we'll see the research has shown that actually the techniques
11
that students think are the most intuitive often tend not to be the ones that are actually the most effective.
12
So if you've got exams coming up then hopefully by the end of this video you'll pick up some techniques
13
that you can apply to your own studies to make everything a little bit more efficient and enjoyable.
14
So let's just jump into it.
15
This is going to be the structure of the video.
16
Firstly I'm going to be talking about the three very popular revision techniques
17
that are shown to be less effective in the literature namely re-reading, highlighting and making notes slash summarizing.
18
Those are by far the most popular techniques but they're also not very effective if you look at the evidence behind them.
19
Secondly I'm going to be introducing the concept of active recall
20
which is by far the most powerful effective study technique and
21
that involves like testing yourself and practicing retrieving information from your brain
22
because the very act of retrieving information actually strengthens connections in the brain and there's like a load of evidence behind this.
23
And finally in part three of the video I'll be giving
24
you some specific tips on how you can actually apply this active recall thing to your own study
25
so hopefully by the end of the video you'll have some practical strategies that you can apply if you feel like it.
26
As always everything is gonna be timestamped down below so
27
if you want to skip to a certain bit of the video feel free
28
but Now let's jump into it and let's talk about the three common
29
but not very effective revision techniques that students love to use.
30
Let's start with rereading.
31
Over here is going to be a list of some of the various studies
32
that have been done that show that students really love rereading as like a really common revision technique.
33
And if you, you know, look at what you've done for your own exams and ask your friends, you'll probably find out that rereading plays a big part of most people's exam preparation strategy.
34
The question is, is rereading effective as a study technique?
35
There have been lots of studies done about this.
36
I will link some of them in the description below but I'm not gonna go into each of them in depth.
37
Instead I'm gonna be quoting from a paper written by Professor Dunlosky
38
which was written in 2013 where he
39
and his colleagues analyzed like hundreds of papers looking at all the research behind 10 different revision techniques
40
and this is what he had to say on the topic of rereading.
41
He said based on the available evidence, we rate rereading as having low utility.
42
Although rereading is relatively economical with respect to time demands, when compared with other learning techniques, rereading is also typically much less effective.
43
The relative disadvantage of rereading to other techniques is the largest strike against it
44
and it's the factor that weighted most heavily in our decision to assign it a rating of low utility.
45
So this professor who's a psychology professor and he
46
and his colleagues have looked at hundreds of research papers looking at evidence-based revision techniques regards rereading your notes
47
or rereading your textbooks as having low utility.
48
He's saying that yeah there's some limited evidence that rereading does work, it does improve retention somewhat, but especially if you compare it to other techniques that you could be doing, rereading is pretty much a waste of time.
49
Here's another quote from a 2016 paper
50
that again looked at the evidence behind lots of study techniques and this is what they had to say about re-reading.
51
They said a wealth of research has shown
52
that passive repetitive reading produces little or no benefit for learning yet not only was repetitive reading the most frequently listed strategy,
53
it was also the strategy most often listed at students number one choice by a large margin.
54
So that's what I'm going to say about re-reading for the time being.
55
I'm very happy to discuss all the evidence against re-reading and against these other techniques.
56
If you guys want to hear about that just leave a comment down below and I'll do it.
57
But I want to focus on stuff you can do rather than kind of just hopping on the stuff
58
that you shouldn't be doing.
59
So we'll close that for now.
60
Rereading, generally, according to the evidence, is pretty ineffective.
61
It does sort of work
62
but you know compared to other things you could be doing it's by no means the most efficient study tactic.
63
Secondly let's talk about highlighting and either we highlight ourselves
64
or we know friends who'd like to highlight their textbooks and their notes in pretty colours.
65
Here is a list of studies that show
66
that highlighting is a very popular revision strategy
67
and I'll link these studies in the description below so if you really want to read them you can.
68
But let's go back to Professor Dunlowski's paper where again he looked at all the evidence around these
69
and this is what he had to say about highlighting and underlining.
70
He said, on the basis of available evidence, we rate highlighting and underlining as having low utility.
71
In most situations that have been examined and with most participants, highlighting does little to boost performance.
72
It may help when students have the knowledge needed to highlight more effectively or when the texts are difficult.
73
But it may actually hurt performance on higher level tasks that require inference making.
74
Especially with art subjects at GCSE and most subjects at A level and definitely everything at undergrad, all of these subjects require inference making.
75
So highlighting, Professor Dunlosky staying, probably not a very good tactic.
76
He continues, he says, future research should be aimed at teaching students how to highlight effectively given
77
that students are likely to continue to use this popular technique despite its relative ineffectiveness.
78
So he's conceding in his paper that although you know the evidence shows that highlighting is not very good, to be honest students are probably going to continue using it.
79
And later on in the paper he describes highlighting as a safety blanket that students like to have.
80
I've experienced this, I'm sure you've experienced this as well.
81
It feels productive doesn't it?
82
Like you know going through a book and highlighting one thing in blue and one thing in yellow one thing in orange.
83
I used to do it all the time
84
but you know the evidence says it's not very good you know we could be doing more efficient things.
85
Finally let's talk about summarizing or making notes.
86
Again a really really popular technique
87
that I have been using pretty much all my life
88
and still use to this day but I'm trying to phase it out
89
because the evidence around summarizing and making notes is you know a bit equivocal.
90
There are some studies that show that students
91
that do summarizing well perform slightly better on exams
92
but it's really quite hard to test this
93
because as you can imagine the quality of notes varies massively between students
94
and so that makes it quite hard to actually test a proper rigorous scientific study about it.
95
In any case Professor Dunlowski again he
96
and his colleagues tried they looked at all the evidence around summarizing and making notes and this is what they said.
97
On the basis of the available evidence we rate summarization as low utility.
98
It can be an effective learning strategy for learners who are already skilled at summarizing.
99
However many learners including children, high school students and even some undergraduates will require extensive training which makes the strategy less feasible.
100
What they're is that if you already know how to effectively summarize and make notes, which you might well do although it tends not to be taught in schools or anything,
101
if you already know that then okay summarization is probably gonna help you.
102
But even if that's the case, even if you're already quite pro at summarizing, it still falls about the middle of the pack when compared to other more effective revision techniques.
103
But I think in general the conclusion we should draw from this is
104
that we are sort of wasting our time probably by making notes.
105
Now that's not to say that if you enjoy making notes that you shouldn't do it.
106
You know I enjoy making notes, I like having pretty colors, I like you know trying to do a bit of calligraphy on them, taking photos for the Instagram, my friends comment on like, oh your notes are so pretty.
107
But to be honest, I wouldn't want to make notes thinking it's an effective revision strategy.
108
And I know looking back on the school days, a lot of my friends who were really into their notes, you know, that have these massive blue folders for chemistry and have absolutely beautiful notes,
109
those were the students that would spend hours and hours on a single topic and then
110
complain sometimes about why stuff wasn't going in.
111
So yeah, making notes, summarizing sort of works, probably doesn't, evidence is a bit iffy about it, I think we should be avoiding it personally based on based on the results of these review papers.
112
Alright, just to sum up what we talked about so far, we've said that rereading, highlighting, underlining and summarizing are probably not very effective revision strategies based on the evidence.
113
So yeah, if we want to make our revision more efficient, we probably shouldn't be doing these three things that we all we all like to do.
114
We had a lecture about this in our second year of medicine
115
and it was towards the end of the year
116
when we had exams coming up and my mind was completely blown
117
when I found out that highlighting and making notes was not very efficient.
118
and talking to a lot of my friends, we were all absolutely aghast that like, you know, how could we have survived these 22 years of our life without knowing,
119
you know, effective study techniques and that we felt
120
that a lot of our own success in exams had been in spite of our revision techniques rather than because of them.
121
So, you know, hopefully at this point you're thinking that, okay, maybe we should be spending a little bit less time doing rereading, highlighting and making notes.
122
Let's now talk about active recall
123
and active recall is by far the most important technique
124
that you can and should be using in order to make your studies more efficient.
125
Active recall or active retrieval or practice testing, whatever you want to call it, basically involves retrieving facts from your brain, retrieving stuff from your brain,
126
because the very act of retrieving stuff from your brain actually strengthens the connections between the stuff in your brain.
127
And this was quite counterintuitive to me, like for me anyway I'd always kind of assumed learning was
128
this sort of process whereby you put stuff into your brain
129
and the only purpose of getting stuff out of your brain was to ace
130
that exam or get their A star or whatever.
131
In fact this cannot be further from the truth
132
and over a hundred years of research has shown that we learn far better by retrieving, practicing, retrieving stuff from our brains than by trying to you know put stuff back into our brains.
133
So what's the evidence behind this?
134
Let's go back to Professor Dunlosky's review paper, you know the one where he looked at hundreds of studies and you know decided that rereading, highlighting and summarizing weren't very good.
135
This is what these guys had to say about practice recall, active recall, practice testing.
136
They said, on the basis of the evidence described above we rate practice
137
testing as having high utility practice testing is not particularly time intensive relative to other techniques
138
and it can be implemented with minimal training.
139
Finally, several studies have provided evidence for the efficacy of practice testing in representative educational contexts.
140
So this review paper that's looked at loads of studies, again, they've said practice testing has very high utility and in fact
141
if you read the paper in their conclusions they recommend that everyone, you know, start testing themselves more if they're not doing it enough already.
142
Now because this is really really important I'm going to be sharing with you three different studies that actually show this properly.
143
If you're already convinced by active recall at this point you can skip to this timestamp
144
and then at this time stamp we'll just be talking about the specific strategies
145
that you can use to implement active recall in your studies
146
but if you're interested in the evidence then continue watching this video
147
and I'll explain some of the studies that have been done
148
that convincingly show that active recall is by far a better revision strategy than pretty much anything else you can do.
149
So let's start with this study from 1939 the start of
150
World War II you know this sort of research has been going back literally decades and decades.
151
What they is that they got groups of students
152
and they made them learn a topic and then gave them a test either a week later or a day later.
153
Now half of these students just kind of studied the material as they normally would and these are their results.
154
So you can see the results were on about 50% for the high achievers
155
and around sort of 30% for the bottom third of the group as decided by some other outcome measure.
156
So that was half of the group.
157
They just studied the subject as they normally would have done
158
and they got a test either a day later or a week later.
159
Now the other half of the class studied the content in
160
exactly the same way however they had a practice test at the end of it and these are their results.
161
So as you can see the guys
162
that had the practice test did far better you know it's
163
an increase of like 15% for the high achievers an increase
164
of like 10 to 15% for the for the bottom third of the class.
165
Just having a practice test at the end of their study session improved their performance by 10 to 15%
166
and I don't know about you but
167
if I could improve my exam performance from by 10 to
168
15% just by you know practice testing myself a bit at the end of each study session I would certainly take that.
169
But that's just one study.
170
Let's talk about another study, a more recent one.
171
This one's from 2010 and again they split students up into two groups.
172
One group we're going to have practice test
173
and the other group we're just gonna restudy the material using whatever method they wanted,
174
most likely rereading, highlighting and summarizing which as we've seen from other studies are the most popular revision techniques for students.
175
And this study was interesting because it tested students on both the facts and concepts.
176
Here is the group that just restudied the material normally and these are their results.
177
So you know hovering between kind of 30 and 40 percent
178
because they just studied the material once and then you know had a test a week later.
179
And here is the group
180
that study the material had a little practice test at the end of it
181
and then had the same test a week later
182
and these are their results
183
and as you can see you know they're performing significantly better
184
for some it's even increase of like 30% for the first group a difference between 30%
185
and 60% and again I don't know about you but if I
186
if I could get a 30% improvement in my exam score by practicing testing myself I would certainly take it
187
and I would yeah be doubling down on that on
188
that strategy as much as I possibly could finally this is
189
one of my favorite studies this is done from 2011
190
and what they did was they split students into four different groups they had to learn material
191
and then had a test at the end like a week later or something like that.
192
The first group was just supposed to study the text, the chapter, once.
193
The second group was just supposed to study it four times.
194
The third group read the text once and then made a mind map
195
and the fourth group read the text once
196
and then just tried to recall as much of the contents of the text as they possibly could.
197
So we've got these four groups.
198
Here are the results.
199
So on verbatim questions, you know, questions specifically from the text about factual things mentioned in the text.
200
The group that studied it once performed the worst.
201
As you can see the active recall group performed significantly better than the group that's that restudied it four times.
202
This kind of tells me that you know
203
if I just practice testing myself once that's probably more effective than rereading this chapter four times
204
and rereading a chapter four times is such a common strategy
205
that you know it's pretty pretty insane
206
that you can get better results by just testing yourself once
207
or just reading it once and just trying to recall as much of it as you can.
208
Okay so that was verbatim questions let's take these same groups of people
209
and ask them inference questions so questions
210
that require you to kind of understand the text a bit more not just retrieve isolated facts from it
211
and here are their results As you can see, the group that studied it once performed the worst as you'd expect because they only studied it once.
212
The active recall group performs the best and the other groups perform alright.
213
Again, active recall, practicing just writing down as much as they could remember from the text, improved their results significantly more than the students that have read the text four times.
214
So I think there's a pretty solid evidence that active recall is a really, really useful strategy.
215
But these guys, being clever psychologists, they had a third phase of the study.
216
And what they did was they, like, before doing any of this, they asked the students what they think the results of the study would be.
217
So they asked the students to kind of have a guess at, you know, which of these techniques would be the most effective.
218
And these are the results of that.
219
So as you can see, the students rated repeated study as being the most useful technique, and they rated active recall as being probably the least effective one.
220
So this kind of goes to show
221
that our own intuitive idea of what makes a good study
222
technique does not match up with the evidence at all we think
223
that you know reading something over
224
and over again of course that's gonna you know increase our understanding increase our retention of it
225
But actually just reading it once and then just practicing testing ourselves It's just
226
so much more efficient that is it's insane
227
that this isn't taught in schools more often And there's a really good book called make it stick
228
Which I'll link down in the description below and
229
which will pop up over here
230
that you can read more about These sorts of techniques
231
if you want and they go into more in depth about the exact evidence behind these techniques
232
But even then you know they say
233
that the two most important things are active recall
234
which we're talking about in this video and spaced repetition which we'll be talking about in the next video.
235
Well, hopefully I've convinced you that rereading, highlighting and summarizing slash making notes are not very effective revision strategies as just by the evidence.
236
Again links in the description below if you want to read it for yourself.
237
And hopefully I've convinced you that active recall
238
or practice testing is a really really useful technique and it's far more efficient than these other techniques that students enjoy using.
239
Now we're going to be talking about specific strategies
240
that you can use to apply active recall or practice testing in your own studies.
241
And the first thing to say is that this is not really rocket science.
242
Pretty much anything you do
243
that requires you to use cognitive effort like use brain power to retrieve information that you have learned once already.
244
Pretty much anything is gonna be really really efficient for you.
245
But having said that I know a lot of you guys benefit from specific strategies.
246
So here are three that I find useful personally.
247
Number one is an app called Anki.
248
Anki is a flashcard app that you might have heard of like loads of medical students use it.
249
The idea behind that is that you make a flat like an online flashcard
250
and then it comes up and in your like practice session.
251
But the special thing about Anki is
252
that once once a flashcard comes up You can mark it as being easy medium
253
or hard and depending on what rating you gave it It comes up later on depending on what
254
that rating was So
255
if you found a fact really easy to recall Maybe they'd ask you again in a day
256
if you found it hard to recall that ask you again in ten minutes
257
If you found it impossible to recall that ask you again in one minute
258
and this kind of learns from your behavior It kind of changes over time
259
So as you progress through your studies as you progress through your revision some facts
260
that are really easy you might see them in two months time
261
because the whole algorithm changes and it really uses this whole spaced repetition thing to great effect.
262
I think Anki is really good for two things.
263
Firstly I think it's really good for memorizing particular facts.
264
So I used it a lot for anatomy back in the
265
day whereas you know what's the nerve supply for particular muscles things like
266
that and I used it a lot for pharmacology
267
so learning the names of drugs and what they do and what the mechanism of action is.
268
In my third year
269
when I was doing psychology as a subject I also used
270
Anki like a lot to memorize particular paragraphs for to like slot into my essays.
271
On one side of the flash I would have Karpicki
272
and Blunt 2011 and on the other side of the flashcard I would describe the study
273
that they did and the evidence behind it and what I was going to say about it.
274
So therefore in the essay, in the exam, when I wanted to recall the Karpicki
275
and Blunt study I would have kind of the information about it already memorised it.
276
So I used it to memorise chunks that I could then drag and drop into my essays effectively.
277
One of my friends is a Cambridge medic, he's got like first class every year, he uses Anki for pretty much everything and he said
278
that he can't imagine getting through Cambridge without having used Anki
279
and instead of making notes and lectures what he started doing now is just going directly to making the flashcard.
280
So yeah if you're interested please do check out Anki, it's free I think you can pay a few pounds for the iOS version but even
281
if you don't want to pay you can use the web version completely free of charge I'll link it here
282
and in the description below.
283
Secondly something that I like doing because I still can't quite break the habit
284
that you know I enjoy making notes is that making notes with the book closed.
285
So not like having the textbook open and making notes
286
and making it all pretty and copying from the textbook like I used to do
287
but actually like learning a topic and then closing the book
288
and then thinking okay how would I explain this topic how
289
would I kind of make my own notes on it
290
so then I write down as much as I can remember
291
about the topic in a nice fashion with like pretty colors
292
because that makes me feel good and then afterwards I open the book and see the bits that I missed.
293
And actually when I was preparing for my third year exams, in third year I did psychology, I ended up that was by far my best performance like ever in my life on any exams.
294
And I think the reason behind that was that
295
because I very aggressively used these two techniques of space repetition and active recall.
296
So what I did I made about 50 different essay plans initially earlier on in the year
297
and then in order to commit those to memory I just drew spider diagrams with the book closed.
298
So I would have a spider diagram for each essay plan
299
and I just draw out as much of it as I could possibly remember
300
and then afterwards when I was done with it I'd look at my actual essay plan
301
and fill out the bits that were missing and I repeated this over over the course of like two months
302
leading up to the exams
303
and by the end of it by the time the exam
304
came around I had these 50 really really good essays in my head
305
that had like 10 references each
306
and was able to just kind of vomit them onto the paper in the actual exam so I would fully endorse
307
this whole making nodes making spider diagrams with the book closed as being a really effective method of active recall
308
and And there is actually some evidence behind this, again it's in the book Make It Stick.
309
It's also in Professor Don Lofsky's paper, you can read it down below.
310
Finally, I want to talk about a third strategy and that's an alternative to making notes.
311
I know that this whole making notes thing, it's really hard to not make any notes.
312
These days, if I'm in a lecture or if I want to learn something, instead of making notes from the lecture or from the textbook, what I instead do is that I write questions for myself.
313
And I think this is called like the Cornell note-taking method, I came across that earlier today when researching stuff for this video.
314
The idea is that you write questions for yourself based on the material such
315
that when you revise the material You look at your questions
316
and you try and actively answer them in your head
317
or on paper or out loud or whatever The point is
318
that instead of passively rereading
319
or highlighting the information like we are tempted to do We
320
have to engage in cognitive effort to retrieve this information from our brains
321
and that Strengthens the connections between the information it makes us more likely to remember it
322
and to understand it
323
So I actually gave a talk about this evidence-based revision thing like three years ago
324
when I was when I was a third year
325
And a friend of mine who was a first year medic
326
at the time after this talk He had about two months left until the exams
327
and he decided
328
that the only technique he was going to use was to just write questions for himself
329
So for the entire Cambridge first year medical syllabus He wrote himself like a list of a hundred
330
and something questions and each night before bed He would just kind of go through them
331
and his revision technique was pretty much just answering these questions
332
And he ended up coming second in the air out of like the whole cohort He's very intelligent in itself, but I
333
but talking to him afterwards He he put a lot of faith in this method of writing questions for yourself
334
because writing questions for yourself makes you engage in cognitive effort
335
and kind of the more the more brain power it takes to recall a fact the better strength
336
and that connection seems to get according to the evidence at least.
337
So yeah instead of kind of writing notes from the textbook
338
or from the revision guide
339
or from the lecture notes maybe try this method where you're writing questions for yourself
340
and then when you're revising the topic using hopefully spaced repetition
341
which we'll talk about in the next video when you're
342
when you're revising the topic then you can just answer the questions in your head
343
and I find this to be a really really effective strategy
344
for getting lots of information into your head very quickly and hopefully you can find it useful as well.
345
So that brings us to the end of the video.
346
I really hope you found some of this useful.
347
Just to summarize, we've talked about why rereading, highlighting, underlining and summarizing slash making notes are probably not very efficient revision techniques.
348
If you're using them, I'm not saying you're doing it wrong.
349
I'm just saying that you know if you're using these techniques, which most of us do, and you think in yourself that your revision is not very effective or you're not really getting the results that you want, then maybe it's time to rethink some of these strategies.
350
Feel free to continue using them, but you know what I would say is that use them but alongside do practice testing, test yourself more and then use space repetition and interleaved practice.
351
Those are the three things we'll be talking about in future videos as well.
352
So yeah hopefully you found this video useful.
353
We talked about why those three particular strategies are not very effective.
354
We talked about some of the evidence behind active recall.
355
I quoted three studies at you
356
and I've given you lots of links in the in the description below if you want to read more about this.
357
The book Make It Stick is really good as well
358
and there's also a few podcast episodes
359
that I've been listening to recently in preparation for this video
360
that I'll link below so you can find loads
361
and loads of people around the world who've looked at all the evidence who are saying exactly the same thing.
362
They're saying that most revision techniques students like to use, like rereading, underlining and making notes, are not very effective and they're saying that by far the most effective techniques are active recall and spaced repetition.
363
So hopefully you can apply those to your to your own revision
364
and I've given you three possible ways to do it
365
but to be honest pretty much anything that you do
366
that requires you to retrieve information from your brain is going to be an effective revision strategy.
367
So yeah, I really hope you like this video.
368
Thank you very much for watching.
369
If you liked the video, if you found it useful, please give a thumbs up or or leave a comment down below.
370
That would be really nice.
371
If you have any questions at all, again, leave a comment down below and I'll try and be as evidence-based as I can in my answers to you guys.
372
So yeah, thanks very much for watching.
373
Please subscribe to the channel if you are not already subscribed
374
and I will see you in the next video and all the best with your revision.
375
I really hope you smash it.
376
Bye-bye.
📺 Same Channel
B2Focus on one thing per quarter to succeed faster - click link in bio for my new app :)
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B21
I Asked 5 Business Owners How They Got Their First Client
British Accent, en-GBBusiness English+2
B21
What I Actually Do When I’m Not Making YouTube Videos
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+3
B21
How to change your life by journaling in 2026
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+3
B21
If I Wanted to Make My First $100K in 12 months, I’d Do This
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B2How I Ranked 1st at Cambridge University - My Secret
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B2If you’re ambitious but lazy, watch this
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B2If you’re ambitious but inconsistent, please watch this
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B24
Why You’re Not Financially Free (Yet)
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B21
How to Learn Anything FASTER
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B22
Success Is Hard Until You Build Systems Like This
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B22
My INSANELY Productive Morning Routine
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+3
C12
How I Manage My Time - 10 Time Management Tips
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B2Study Tips - How to learn new content
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B21
How to Find a Career You Genuinely Love
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B21
8 Simple Hacks to Improve Your Health
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B21
If I Was a Student Again, I'd Do This
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+3
B22
How to Not Waste Your Life (Stop Getting Distracted)
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+3
C12
My Top 3 Journaling Prompts
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B21
i am begging you to try harry potter fan fiction
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
✨ Recommend Video
B21
176 sentences
how to study less and get higher grades
High School StudentsUniversity Students+1
B222
188 sentences
9 Study Techniques that got me through Cambridge Medical School *science-backed*
British Accent, en-GBUniversity Students+2
B11
27 sentences
LEARNING ENGLISH - LESSON 1 ( Repeat and Remember)
British Accent, en-GBHigh School Students+4
B29
102 sentences
How to Study More Effectively | Learning English Podcast | B1/B2 English Listening Practice
High School StudentsUniversity Students+3
B24
121 sentences
How To Remember EVERYTHING Like The Harvard Students (Study Less fr)
High School StudentsUniversity Students+2
B2388 sentences
How I went from FAILING to TOP Electrical Engineering Student (Best Study Tips)
High School StudentsUniversity Students+1
B21
204 sentences
how to take notes like the top 1% of students
High School StudentsUniversity Students+1
B21
57 sentences
"It's Hard Getting Good Grades" - Study Motivation
High School StudentsUniversity Students+1
B2340 sentences
how to be the PERFECT student 📖 organization, discipline & romanticizing school for academic success
High School StudentsUniversity Students+1
B24
31 sentences
Give me 3 minutes and I'll help you LOVE studying again.
High School StudentsUniversity Students+3
Evidence-Based Study Tips for Exam Success: What Works (and What Doesn’t)
Preparing for exams can feel overwhelming, but the video “How to study for exams - Evidence-based revision tips” breaks down proven strategies to make your efforts more effective. Hosted by a final-year Cambridge medical student, the content draws on a century of psychological research to challenge common study habits and introduce science-backed techniques—valuable not just for exams, but for building long-term retention, which is key for skills like IELTS speaking practice where recall and fluency matter.
Common but Ineffective Techniques: Rereading, Highlighting, and Summarizing
The video first critiques three popular methods: rereading, highlighting, and note-taking. Studies, including a 2013 analysis by Professor Dunlosky, show these techniques have “low utility.” Rereading, for example, is time-efficient but far less effective than other methods. While it may feel productive, it doesn’t strengthen memory as effectively as active engagement—similar to how passive listening in language learning doesn’t boost speaking skills as much as shadowing technique, which requires active mimicry.
Active Recall: The Most Powerful Study Tool
The core of the video is active recall, a technique where you test yourself to retrieve information. This process strengthens brain connections, making memories easier to access later. For English learners, this mirrors shadow speak—repeating phrases immediately after hearing them forces your brain to process and reproduce language, improving fluency and pronunciation. Just as active recall beats rereading, shadowing outperforms passive listening for building practical speaking skills.
Practical Application: Tips for Active Recall
To apply active recall, the video suggests self-testing with flashcards or practice questions. For language learners, this could mean creating flashcards with phrases and testing yourself to speak them aloud—combining active recall with shadow speech for double the benefit. By replacing passive study habits with active engagement, you’ll not only ace exams but also build skills that stick, whether for academic success or real-world communication.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.