This one is a bit long, but if you can make it through you have an opportunity to boost your scores by 30% and shoot your retention through the roof.
Let’s get started.
The Secret to Studying – How to Get Good Grades Even if You’re Not the Smartest Person in Your Class
The Technique That Has Been Proven to Increase Scores Upwards of 30%
Talking about learning without talking about forgetting is huge mistake. It’s like talking about making money without talking about losing money. When a gambler, stock trader or businessman tells you how much money they made, you should immediately question how much they’ve lost.
Warren Buffet has famously said about investing, “Rule #1: Don’t lose money.”
Let me tell you the story of a study that was published in the Journal of Extremely Obvious Findings. I don’t remember where it was published off hand, but that doesn’t make the story any less valuable.
A study was designed to test the forgetting process. A group of students was split into two groups and asked to read a story.( I know this is riveting stuff. Don’t worry I’m getting there.) Group A students took a test immediately after reading the story. Group B students took the same test a week later.
Group A wound up with a 53% on the test they took. That number doesn’t matter on its own, it’s the comparison that counts. Much to no one’s surprise group B scored quite a bit lower. Well,a lot lower, clocking in at only 38%.
Not exactly Earth-shattering news. I hardly need to reference a study to tell you that you forget almost EVERYTHING the minute you walk out of an exam after an all-night-cram session. But, how do you keep from forgetting? And why do you remember some things forever?
Your phone number?
Your address?
Your dog’s name?
You don’t forget those things. I can tell you the phone numbers of my three best friends from elementary school.We haven’t lived in those houses (yes, the phones were connected to the walls then) in over twenty years. Those don’t disappear or fade. They don’t fade because of years and years using Spaced Repetition.
This is a big one. I mean huge. I mean like an elephant in a garden shed. That reminds me…
What do you call an elephant that doesn’t matter?
An irrelephant.
Moving right along. When you first discover active studying, it’s usually in the form of flashcards. Flashcards give you the ability to do repetition, and that’s where I started. I never used them in college (probably should’ve), but I used tons, truckloads even, of flashcards in PA school. We’d buy them at Costco. I mean I’d buy index cards by the palate. You’d think we redid the floor in our living room because it looked like white tile at first glance. You’d have to jump from open floor to open floor.
It was like playing Pitfall but without the alligators.
Index cards were everywhere. I specifically remember anatomy class my first year. Anatomy was an absolute killer. I think half of our class failed that first exam.Our professor, who incidentally taught us that a clean tibia makes an excellent weapon, was furious. He laid into us good. He really let us have it. Not me though. When my paper came around, there was a big fat 98% on top. And I owed that to the TOWERS of flashcards piled all around my living room. But, I could have done even better had I known the glories of spaced repetition.
I used flashcards the only way I knew how. I worked on one stack. Once I knew them, they went into a pile which I mentally marked complete, and I moved on. Shame, shame, shame. I could have done so much better had I only held on tighter to that pile of cards. I was so close to nailing it. I didn’t find out about spaced repetition until years later. Boy, are you lucky finding out about it now.
Here’s the big secret. You continue to use the flashcards, but you add time to the equation. What you do is you go through your stack of flashcards until you know them. Then you set them aside for a predetermined amount of time. Something relatively short. At first, let’s say 15 minutes for this example.
Then you grab that same stack of cards again, and you repeat everyone until you know them. Then you wait a longer period of time. Let’s say an hour.
Then you grab that stack of cards, and you go through everyone until you have them down cold. Now comes the part I never ever did, but wish I had. You review them AGAIN at little bit longer time interval. Let’s say 3 or 4 hours. Then, when you wake up the next morning, you go through that stack again and then one more time before bed. To do even better let a day go by and then pull that same stack out again and you’ll own it.
Spaced repetition is when you repeat a task with specific and increasing time intervals.You have spaces between your practice sessions, and then make those spaces longer and longer. The fancy name for this process is temporal distribution of practice. You can tell your friends when they ask in shock,
“How on earth did you get such a good grade on that test? We all bombed it.”
“Elementary, whenever I study, I use temporal distribution of practice.”
And it’s true, adding spaced repetition will turn things around faster than a knife fight in a phone booth.
According to prominent researcher and head of the Cognition and Memory in Education & Learning lab at the University of Arizona, Jonathan G. Tullis, “The advantages provided to memory by the distribution of multiple practice or study opportunities are among the most powerful effects in memory research.”
If you aren’t using some significant amount of spaced repetition in your studying, you’re missing the boat. First, you don’t have time to be constantly relearning material, and second, it’s methodical. You can develop your practice over time and refine your method to make you even better at it.
You will get almost instant feedback as far as what works best for you, and with that feedback, you’ll get better and better.
Allow me to illustrate.
You’re working on a stack of cards that covers the upper extremity, including the brachial plexus and the muscles with their origins and insertions (bleh).
You cover it once, then wait 15 minutes and do it again. Then you go to dinner, a delicious reprieve from the real world, and then back to it. Four hours have passed, and you feel like you’re starting over with that stack of flashcards. You can’t remember a thing. Well, then you’d review them again in an hour and again before bed.
On the other hand, if you came back from that succulent dinner and you race easily through the cards you would set them aside until morning and hit them again at that point. Plan the intervals from the outset, but be flexible. Remember it has to be a little hard or you’re going over them too soon.
You will get much better at this as you go. The intervals depend on the material and the individual. What someone else uses when studying a different topic doesn’t apply to you at all. Don’t compare notes on this. Figure it out for yourself.
Students retained 30% more for up to a month using this one technique!
As if the memory benefits of spaced repetition weren’t enough, I’m going to show you why it’s even better than that. Remember, all of this stuff builds on itself. We’re about to take it to the next level.
The longer you need to remember something, the longer the lag time before the final practice session should be.
Wait a minute…. What does that mean?
It means that if you need to remember something longer, let’s say you’re studying cardiology now, but your PANRE isn’t for another 2 months – that space before your final repetition should be longer, maybe a few days or a week.
Those studied using a lag time of one day before the final repetition showed an improvement of 30% in test scores when tested between 8 and 30 days later. They remembered 30% more for up to ONE MONTH after studying, simply by using repetition and waiting a full day before the last study session. Let me repeat that – Students retained 30% more for up to a month using this one technique!
How could something so simple have such a huge impact? You don’t believe me, do you?30% more you say, that’s ridiculous, and I agree, it’s a HUGE number.
But, haven’t you wondered why some people in your class look like they’re NOT working that hard? You know you’re just as smart as them. How are they pulling it off? They’re always getting good grades, and it seems like they don’t put in nearly the effort or time that you do.
Hard work isn’t always the answer. It’s part of the answer, but not the whole answer. Digging a ditch is hard work whether you’re using shovel or backhoe, but you get a lot more done in a lot less time with a backhoe.
Just in case you don’t like anecdotal evidence here’s the paper where the numbers came from.
Nicholas, Cepda; Pashler, Harold; Vul, Ed; Wixted, John; & Rohrer, Douglas. Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354 – 380. UC San Diego:
This paper is a meta-analysis of 839 sessions, testing spaced repetition. That’s a big number. It seems pretty thorough to me. Reading the paper won’t help you though. You have to test it for yourself.. Grab a stack of flashcards and a notebook. Set up what you think your intervals should be and then get to work.
Now, if you’re not the type to fill your living space with small white scraps of paper I’ve made this a little easier. The Final Step is the book I wrote while preparing this way for my PANRE.I took all of the short quick flash card type questions I’d written and put them into one easy use convenient and handy book.
For 2021, I’ve got the second edition of The Final Step. We went from 1,200 questions to over 2,000 questions, designed specifically with the idea of spaced repetition in mind. There are a few other principles baked in there two, like the Testing Effect, but that is beyond this email since it’s already plenty long enough.
Today is the last day to get your hands on The Final Step 2.0 and really put this stuff into action.
Hopefully there are a few copies left.
Better hurry…
Brian Wallace