The Ultimate Study Guide: Decoding Learning from Book to Brain to Aced Exam

Do you want to ace your exams without spending countless hours rereading the same material? Do you want to learn how to study smarter, not harder, using proven strategies backed by science? If so, you’re in the right place. In this blog post, we’re going to show you our entire process on how to study for exams from beginning to end, and we’re going to use the Mike and Maddie Map, which is our study blueprint filled with evidence-based study techniques, to make this entire process as effective and efficient as possible for you.

The Two Steps of Learning

The process of learning involves two steps: understanding and remembering. First, you have to get the information from the books into your brain. This is also called encoding. Second, you have to retrieve that information when you need it, such as on the test. This is also called retrieval. For each of the two phases of learning, we’re going to discuss the scientific strategies, techniques, and methods that will get you there.

How to Understand the Material

The strategy for understanding material is to use structure. A lot of people think that when we store information in our brains, we file it neatly into separate filing cabinets. But that’s not really how the brain is structured. Information is actually strung together like a web. Your brain likes to take new things and relate them back to prior knowledge you already have. So, for example, learning calculus by itself is difficult, but if you already know the fundamental subjects like algebra and geometry, it’s a lot easier to pick up calculus. You can learn through analogies or by making connections through logic. You can use a structure from your prior knowledge to support this new incoming knowledge.

The technique that best helps you understand information is teaching. Teaching forces you to understand something in your own words, and if you can convey that to a child, then you really understand it. And remember that you already have a structure from the first step, so when you’re teaching someone, teach from the layout of that structure. Teaching doesn’t mean that you have to get in front of a classroom. You can do it at home. Just say it out loud or type out the information as if you’re teaching. As long as you’re putting it into your own words and not just regurgitating information from your lectures, you’re doing it right.

The method that helps you understand information is mixing. Mix up the sources from which you get your information. Maybe the way that the teacher explains in class makes no sense to you, but maybe your friend explains the same topic in a different way, and it just clicks. Or maybe there’s a YouTube video out there that explains it even better. The only thing that matters at the end of the day is that you understand the information. It doesn’t matter how many teachers there are. It doesn’t matter who’s the teacher. Mix it up and try different sources until it makes sense to you.

How to Remember the Material

The strategy to help you remember faster is to use spacing. It’s basically the opposite of trying to cram everything in the day before the test. Instead, you want to space out your reviews. Look at each individual topic for just a little bit each day. The most important thing to realize is that some topics take a lot longer to master than others. For example, it would take me many more reviews to master chapter 10 than chapter 1. But the only way I knew this was to space out my reviews, and at the end of each session, I ranked how well I knew each chapter. And when I do this, I can see that, oh, I keep ranking chapter 10 as difficult and chapter 1 as easy. So now I know not to waste any more time relearning Chapter 1 and to focus my time on Chapter 10.

The technique to help you remember is testing, or active recall, or retrieval practice, whatever you want to call it. Basically, you’re testing yourself to see how well you can remember the information without looking at your notes or e-books. The mistake that students make is that they study by reading their notes or their highlights. But if you’re asked to close your notes, can you actually remember what was on the page? Because chances are, you won’t have those notes with you on the test. So cover them up and try to recall them. Or better yet, find past papers, problem sets, and practice tests and do those. Test your memory exactly as it will be tested on the day of the exam.

The method for remembering lots of information at a high level is memorizing. Memorizing isn’t always the best way to retain information long-term, but sometimes there are things you just have to memorize for the test, like dates or names of things or random equations. Well, there are many memorization methods, like mnemonics, mind palace, the peg system, and chunking. The list goes on. Just remember that not everything should be memorized. Sometimes, when you truly understand a concept and you’re able to logically derive it from scratch, you don’t even need to memorize it.

Conclusion

So those are the strategies, techniques, and methods from a high-level overview, just so you can get an idea of how your studies should be flowing from book to brain to exam and how to actually do that effectively and efficiently. We hope you found this blog post helpful and informative. If you want to learn more about how to apply these study tips and improve your grades, we have a free study course that you can watch on Skillshare. It’s called Seven Days to Better Grades. We’ve designed this course around a week of daily actionable steps so that you can see results quickly. And it’s a fundamental system that you should invest in early so that it can pay off many years of school and exams down the line. So click the link below to join the course, and we’ll see you there. Happy studying!