How to incorporate active recall into your studying

By now, most people have heard of active recall. It’s an incredibly popular studying technique – and for good reason: research has shown that it leads to better results. However, what most articles and studies fail to mention is how exactly you can incorporate active recall into your studying. Luckily, I’ve created a short list of the active recall methods that I find the most helpful so that you can try them before your next exam 🙂

Flashcards

Whether they be paper or online (through apps like Anki and Quizlet), flashcards are a tremendous help, especially for memorisation-heavy subjects. They’re incredibly useful since you can make flashcards when you first start learning a topic, then use them to revise once you get closer to your test date

Practice questions

I only recently heard about this method, but it’s actually super interesting and I think it has a lot of potential. Essentially, what happens is that you create question banks for yourself when you first start learning about a topic, then you answer them when you need to revise. Not only does it incorporate active recall, but this method also lets you focus on the topics you’re less confident in, since you can choose to answer questions in specific units.

Past papers

Although they’re less customisable than practice questions, past papers are still super useful for people who want to work on their exam technique. As well as this, past papers let you see what real exam questions look like, meaning you’ll be better prepared to answer the questions on the day.

Mindmaps

What I sometimes like to do for subjects that have lots of concepts (like economics) is to make mindmaps of all the information. However, I try to do it without my notes so that I’ll be testing myself on whether I can remember all the information. Once you’re done, you can check your notes to make sure you haven’t made any mistakes or missed anything out.

Quiz your friends

I used this method extensively before my most recent history test, and it really helped me remember all the important people, dates, and events (thank you so much E!). When you want to use this method though, there are a couple of really important things to remember – both of you should know the material (otherwise you can’t ask each other questions), and both of you should be motivated to learn. Remember that you’re there to study, not to chat!