A student sits down on Sunday and reads Chapter 1 for four hours. By the end, he feels he knows everything. His knowledge feels like 100 percent. Then he goes on to Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and so on, and plans to come back to Chapter 1 just before the exam.
What happens? In my training programmes I explain it like this. Twenty four hours later, he remembers only about ten percent of what he read. Two days later, only a few lines. After a week, he can barely recall the name of the chapter. This is not laziness. This happens to everybody.
The student who postpones
Most students leave their reading until the exam is near. Then there is very little time, and they try to memorise everything by heart together. The result is confusion. Chapter 1, Chapter 8 and Chapter 15 all begin to look the same. Marks suffer, and the student blames his memory.
Memory is not the problem. The schedule is the problem. Your parents and teachers have been telling you to start from day one. They are right, and there is a good reason behind the advice.
Read today, repeat tomorrow
Here is the simple schedule that works.
- Day 1: Read Chapter 1 for four hours.
- Day 2: Revise Chapter 1 in only fifteen minutes. Use the remaining time to read Chapter 2.
- Day 3: Revise Chapter 1 in five minutes, Chapter 2 in fifteen minutes, and read Chapter 3 in the remaining time.
- Every fortnight: Revise all the chapters once.
If you keep this up, every chapter stays fresh on any given day. By exam time, you are not learning. You are only polishing.
The same principle works for any lecture or class. Give it a short review soon after. Then review again after one hour, one day, one week, one month, and two months. Each review can be very short. Even three minutes is enough. You are not studying again from the start. You are telling your brain, again and again, that this matters.
Do not read for hours without checking
There is a second habit that I teach, and students are usually shocked by it. When you read for four or five hours a day, read for one hour and then take a break of ten minutes. In those ten minutes do not check your phone. Sit in a different chair, close your eyes, and try to recall everything you read in the last hour.
The first time you do this, you may find that you can hardly recall anything. Do not worry. This is exactly why you do it. Then go back to your book and go through that portion again. Now it will stay. If you read for five hours, you will recall for fifty minutes in total, five breaks of ten minutes each. This builds both your understanding and your recall. You will not walk into the examination hall wondering what you missed.
This is much better than cramming huge masses of information in one go, without knowing how much has really sunk in.
Facts, figures and formulae
Some things only need plain repetition. Definitions, dates, atomic weights, multiplication tables, names and formulae are in this group. Here are three ways to make repetition work for them.
- Write all the facts and figures on a chart and paste it above your study table. Read, observe and revise the chart for ten minutes twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. In a few days you will not need the chart any more.
- Keep one separate notebook for formulae, in your own handwriting. It is easier to revise from a single place. Write the formulae where you tend to go wrong in a different colour, red if possible, because red stands out the most.
- Revise formulae three times as often as the rest of your syllabus.
Remember, though, that the mechanical method of repetition is for facts. It is not for procedures or processes. For those, you must understand first.
Start with one subject this week
You do not need to change everything. Pick just one subject. After your next study session, do a fifteen minute revision the next day, and a five minute revision the day after that. Then add the ten minute recall break to every hour. Within two weeks, you will see the difference. Memory is a habit, and habits grow by small daily practice.
This is one chapter from my book Train Your Brain.
