Seriously, Don't Cram

No matter how many times professors tell us not to study the day before an exam, we, college students, can't help but procrastinate and take on their challenge. We go through each topic we learned throughout the semester in order as fast as we can, from beginning to end. Others don't procrastinate and make flashcards to memorize vocabulary words, mechanisms for chemistry, or just about any topic that has a definition attached to it. However, going through those flashcards may not be the best way to study for an exam.

Dr. Barbara Knowlton came in to our NEUR 300 Seminar to talk about her research, "Brain-behavior correlates of optimizing learning through interleaved practice". Her research found that participants in her study learned more efficiently and effectively when they were presented with material to study in interleaved order (random order) rather than in blocks (nonrandom). Participants were given three sequences to study over the course of two days and then were tested on day five. Their response times, frontal-parietal blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal, and motor cortex excitability were recorded using the task at hand, fMRI and by ppTMS, respectively. Although those who practiced using the interleaving method showed slower response times, greater BOLD signals, and higher excitability during practice, when they were asked to retrieve the sequences the opposite effects showed in the participants. Ultimately, Dr. Knowlton found that although people who study things in random order make more mistakes while they are learning, they are creating long-term retrieval so that they can retrieve that information days later rather than storing it in their working memory to use in a couple of hours.

The same results were found when a cognitive scientist named Doug Rohrer of the University of South Florida conducted similar research! On a math homework assignment, some skills were practiced using blocking (nonrandom order) - students were required to do the same type of problem over and over again. Other skills were practiced using interleaving - students were required to perform all different types of math problems. When given a surprise test, "students solved 72% of the problems that they'd studied in mixed sets, compared with 38% of those in blocked, homework-as-usual-sets". This study also showed that interleaved problem-solving is more efficient than blocking, similar to Dr. Knowlton's findings.

Now back to the flashcard example: studying flashcards in the same order is not going to be very helpful since they're being studied in a blocked fashion. Shuffle the flashcards so you get a different order or flip them around and test your knowledge of a vocabulary word rather than testing yourself on just the definition. So during finals week, make sure you're switching things up and not studying the same exact topic in the same exact order for hours on end; spread out your studying over a couple days (that's kind of too late at this point, but keep it in mind for next semester)!

Carey, Benedict. "Studying for the Test by Taking It." The New York Times. The New York Times, 22 Nov.
2014. Web. 09 Dec. 2015.

Lin, Chien-Ho (Janice), Barbara J. Knowlton, Ming-Chang Chiang, Marco Iacoboni, Parima Udompholkul, and Allan D. Wu. "Brain–behavior Correlates of Optimizing Learning through Interleaved Practice." NeuroImage 56.3 (2011): 1758-772. Web.