STOP STUDYING WRONG - 8 Science-Backed Study Habits

Dr. Lottie talks explains 8 science-backed habits that will help you learn more effectively & smash your vet school exams. She talks about how these concepts work, why they are so good at boosting learning and how you can implement them into your study routine.

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Timeline:
00:00 Intro
01:44 1 – Space your Studying
04:18 2 – Mix your Subjects
07:04 3 – Elaborative Encoding
09:59 4 – Active Recall
12:25 5 – Manage your Cognitive Load
15:04 6 – GO TO SLEEP
17:44 7 – Move your Body 💃
19:34 8 – Try Not to STRESS
22:30 What to NOT do
25:54 Key Points
28:41 Outro

References

• Murre, J.M.J. and Dros, J. (2015) ‘Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve’, PLoS ONE, 10(7), p. e0120644. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0120644.
• Taylor, K. and Rohrer, D. (2010) ‘The effects of interleaved practice’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24(6), pp. 837–848. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1598.
• Craik, F.I.M. and Lockhart, R.S. (1972) ‘Levels of processing: A framework for memory research’, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11(6), pp. 671–684. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(72)80001-X.
• Bradshaw, G.L. and Anderson, J.R. (1982) ‘Elaborative encoding as an explanation of levels of processing’, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 21(2), pp. 165–174. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(82)90531-X.
• Sweller, J. (2011) ‘Cognitive load theory’, The psychology of learning and motivation: Cognition in education, Vol. 55. San Diego, CA, US: Elsevier Academic Press (The psychology of learning and motivation), pp. 37–76. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-387691-1.00002-8.
• Rasch, B. and Born, J. (2013) ‘About sleep’s role in memory’, Physiological Reviews, 93(2), pp. 681–766. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00032.2012.
• Walker, M.P. and Stickgold, R. (2004) ‘Sleep-dependent learning and memory consolidation’, Neuron, 44(1), pp. 121–133. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2004.08.031.
• Cotman, C.W., Berchtold, N.C. and Christie, L.-A. (2007) ‘Exercise builds brain health: key roles of growth factor cascades and inflammation’, Trends in Neurosciences, 30(9), pp. 464–472. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2007.06.011.
• Lupien, S.J. et al. (2009) ‘Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition’, Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 10(6), pp. 434–445. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2639.

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Host

Dr. Lottie Wilkinson

Creator and host of the Current Vet podcast

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Hello, hello and welcome back to Current Vet. This is the podcast that makes veterinary medicine simple. I'm your host, Dr. Lottie, and today we are going to talk about revision. So a lot of you're gonna be heading towards your end of your exams and are probably starting to feel a little bit stressed. So this episode is gonna be walking you through the things that.

We actually know from psychology and neuroscience research about how memory works and how we can use really good habits to improve our memory and our learning without overloading ourselves. Before exams, a lot of things students default to during revision can. Feel productive, but not actually be very efficient for long-term information retention.

So today I'm gonna talk you through eight habits that are genuinely backed by research and that you can realistically implement in the next couple of weeks leading up to exams. So for each one, I'm gonna explain the concept, the science behind why it works, and then how you can use it practically within your revision.
To master your exams, I'm then gonna go quickly through a few things that we should absolutely not be doing, and that can harm your learning. I think I used to listen to advice like this at vet school and then immediately go back to my old habits. So be better than me.

I actually wish I'd looked into these techniques a few years ago. So I hope there's something here for everyone to take away from the episode and start using in your own revision. So let's get straight into our first tip.

1 - Space your Studying

Tip number one is to space your revision. Spacing effect has been studied for over a century.
Irving House first described patterns of forgetting in the 18 hundreds with his forgetting curve, and his research showed that the information we learn is forgotten if it isn't reviewed within one to two days after we it. So after two days, we can lose up to 70% of what we learned and 90% in a month if the information isn't reviewed.

But it's important to understand why this happens. So when you first learn something, the information is relatively unstable. It is sent to the hippocampus, which acts almost like a short-term indexing system. So over time, and especially with repeated retrieval, that memory becomes more integrated into your long-term memory.

If you study something repeatedly in one sitting, retrieval becomes really easy. Because you're accessing it from short-term memory, so it feels good. It feels like you've can finely remember it and you've learned it, but when you come back to it after a couple of days, retrieval is more difficult and more effortful because some of that short-term memory has been lost.

To retrieve that information, the brain has to work harder, and that retrieval process is strengthening the synaptic connections and promotes long-term memory consolidation. So in other words, spacing works because it forces that information retrieval.

This is also why cramming revision can feel incredibly effective in the short term. You can perform really well afterwards because activation and that short term memory is high, but without space revision, you don't build your long term effective memory.

So what does this mean for your vet revision? Instead of doing three consecutive days of one subject and then not looking at it again, you want to structure your revision, learn the topic. Then three to five days later, try and remember the core mechanisms without looking at your notes. Then check them, fill in anything you've missed.

A week later, revisit it again with some exam style questions. Maybe then schedule another recheck. One to two weeks after that, your sessions don't need to be long. What matters is that you deliberately are re exposing yourself to the same information after a delay.

2 - Mix your Subjects

Tip number two is to mix revision subjects instead of blocking them. So this second habit is called interleaving. Most students revise in a block of content. You do maybe three hours of cardiology and then maybe three hours of endocrinology in the afternoon, and so on, so on. And that feels really organized.
It feels focused. It feels. Good. But research shows that mixing different types of problems or topics within a study session called interleaving leads to better long-term performance than blocking your work out. So when you block study, you're repeatedly applying that same framework over and over again.

Which again is gonna improve your short term performance because you're reinforcing that one thing. But in our exams, they're not going to give you these nice organized categories. They present you with a question, and the first step to understanding that question is identifying what the question is actually asking you.

What system is this? What mechanism is it pointing to? What type of pathology is this? So interleaving forces your brain to repeatedly switch context and identify the topic before retrieving the information. The constant switching strengthens what is called discriminative contrast, which is the ability to distinguish between similar concepts.

So you think about, potentially think about your differentiating causes of PUPD or distinguishing cardiac causes of dyspnea from respiratory causes or differentiating similar endocrinopathies, if you always revise each topic in isolation, you strengthen your within topic knowledge.

Interleaving strengthens understanding and comparison between different topics. Now to fit this into your revision, you can structure your sessions so that once you've covered the basics of a topic, you start mixing in something else. So for example, you do 45 minutes of cardiology mechanisms, then 45 minutes of endocrine pathophysiology, and then a block of mixed exam questions that include a little bit of both, and it may feel a little bit less.

Organized, and you won't get that kind of like smooth in the groove feeling, but the evidence shows that your performance in exams improves when you interleave, especially in subjects that require discrimination, which of course veterinary medicine absolutely does. This also pairs really nicely with spacing because you can separate out your revision of different topics over a week and consistently come back to them rather than focus on one topic for a couple of days.

3 - Elaborative Encoding

Tip number three is called elaborative encoding, and it's about how deeply you process information when you first learn it. There's a well-known framework in psychology called the Levels of Processing Theory, and it was developed by Craig and Lockhart in the 1970s. The basic idea is that the depth at which you process information determines how well you remember it later on.

So shallow processing is like rereading or focusing on surface level information leads to weaker memory formation. Or deep or semantic processing. So for example, linking your meanings and connecting mechanisms produces much stronger and more durable memory. Memory isn't stored as separate facts. It's stored in networks.

And the more connections you build between new pieces of information and existing knowledge, the more route you create to access that same new information. And this is really important in VetMed because almost everything is mechanistic and interconnected. You don't get isolated pathologies
that have zero impact on the rest of the body.

Everything is always interconnected. So if you memorize that hyper adrenal cord system causes PUPD, that is one pathway. If you understand that the excess cortisol in hyper adrenal cortic interferes with a DH action and alters renal water handling, and you link that to physiology that you already know to the pathology, and now you have multiple different entry points to retrieve that concept.

You understand the concept a lot better. Building these information networks is called elaborative encoding. It's creating that web of associations and connecting different areas of knowledge to deepen your understanding and improve information retention. So generating explanations, forming associations, asking why something happens, all strengthens this encoding because you're integrating information into existing networks rather than storing it as standalone facts.

This makes later retrieval much easier 'cause there are more cues that can trigger that memory. So when you're studying, before you move onto another topic, make sure you understand what does this connect to? What other systems does this affect? How would this present differently in another species?

And what is the underlying physiology that explains clinical signs. Even better try explaining the mechanism out loud as if you are teaching someone or actually teach a friend.

4 - Active Recall

So tip number four is retrieval practice, and I'm sure a lot of you will have heard of this, but I want to explain it properly because most people misunderstand what retrieval is doing. There's a large body of research on what is called the testing effect, and these studies shows that the students who repeatedly retrieved information performed significantly better at recall further down the line than students who repeatedly reread the same information, even when the rereading group felt more confident.

So retrieval is not just gonna be a way of checking whether you know something. When you are actively pulling information out of long-term memory, you reactivate that neural pattern associated with the information. That reactivation strengthens the synaptic connections involved in storing it, and also makes the retrieval pathway more efficient.

So essentially, you're increasing the probability that the network will fire again in the future when you need it.

Rereading information does not do this in the same way because the information is sitting in front of you and you are not recalling it. So this testing and active recall. Also improves what is called retrieval strength, which is the ease and speed with which you can access information, which is obviously gonna be crucial for your exams.

It's kind of like going to the gym. The more you go, the more consistent you are, the stronger you become, and you find doing the same exercises becomes easier. So when you're studying, you can include your retrieval practice by closing your notes, write everything down that you can remember about a topic.
Answer some exam questions without using your notes. Explain your mechanisms out loud from memory, and then go back. Check your accuracy, fill in the gaps. But remember, if you wait too long up between learning the information and retrieving it and you can't retrieve anything at all, that is obviously not gonna be helpful if you do it immediately after studying and it's too easy.

That is obviously not ideal either. So. Surprise, surprise. We can pair it with spacing, so if you learn it, you wait a little bit, retrieve the information, correct yourself, and then revisit it again later.

5 - Manage your Cognitive Load

Okay. Tip number five is to manage your cognitive load. This is about something called Cognitive Load Theory developed by John Sweller. So the core idea is that your working memory, the system that you use to actively process information is limited. You can only hold a small number of elements at one time.
Once that capacity has exceeded, your learning efficiency will drop. There are three types of cognitive load described. So the intrinsic load is the complexity of the material itself.

The extraneous, extraneous, unsure, how to say that word, extraneous load is the unnecessary mental effort taken up by things like distractions. So like. If you have your phone around or if you've got music on, and then you have the germane load, which is the beneficial mental effort that contributes to building long-term memory networks, which are also known as schemas.

So when students sit down and try and do all of cardiology in one sitting, your intrinsic load is already high because the content is really complex. If you then add fatigue, multitasking, your phone notifications a poorly structured approach, the extraneous load increases. The working memory becomes overloaded, and your ability to encode and commit the information to long-term memory will fall so you can actually feel really busy and still not be learning efficiently at all.

So when you're studying, you should firstly break complex topics into segments. So instead of revising, for example, endocrinology as one massive topic, break it down into pathophysiology mechanisms, clinical signs, diagnostics treatment. Study one thing before moving on to the next. Secondly, remove all the unnecessary noise.

Study with one tab open. Silence your notifications. Do not try. Multitask, multitasking, splits your working memory resources and reduces your encoding efficiency. And

thirdly is to build your long-term memory networks gradually. The goal isn't to memorize everything all at once. It's to build these organized connections in the brain, and once these connections and networks are built, it takes up less working memory to process related information.

And studying starts to feel a lot easier.

6 - GO TO SLEEP

Okay, tip number six is sleep. Obviously we had to have this in there. Um, sleep directly affects how well your revision sticks in your brain. There is a huge amount of research on sleep dependent memory consolidation, and it shows that during slow wave sleep, so particularly during deep non-REM sleep, the hippocampus plays recently encoded memories back.

So what this means in simple terms is that information you studied during the day. Things that you learned are reactivated and gradually integrated into the long-term storage overnight. When you first learn something, the hippocampus acts as that short term memory storage.

So over time, and especially during sleep, these memories and information are redistributed across your wider cortical networks, and that is called the systems consolidation theory. If you constantly restrict your sleep, two things happen. Firstly, your short-term encoding and learning capacity the next day becomes less efficient because the hippocampus is less responsive.

There are imaging studies showing reduced hippocampal activity after sleep deprivation. Secondly, the consolidation of what you learned the previous day is impaired. So when students pull all-nighters thinking that they're gaining all these extra study hours. It's actually reducing both your ability to learn new information and your brain's ability to process the information that you already learned.

So this doesn't mean that you need perfect sleep, but consistency does matter. Seven to nine hours is, you know, the classic, general recommendation for young adults. But what actually might be more important is regular timing helps to stabilize your circadian rhythms, which also affect your cognitive performance.

So actually having a regular bedtime and a regular wake time might be more important than the exact number of hours you sleep per night in the weeks leading up to your exams. Make sure sleep is a non-negotiable part of your revision schedule. Do not do intense new information learning right before you go to bed.

If you do wanna do something in the evening, maybe do a quick review of stuff you learn in the day or a couple of quick fire questions, but avoid high stress cramming at midnight.

7 - Move your Body 💃🏻

Tip number seven is movement. So specifically moderate aerobic exercise. And this isn't a generic kind of exercise that's good for you, load of advice, obviously it is. But there is also a bunch of research on how exercise improves your brain function. So studies have shown that aerobic exercise increases levels of brain derived neurotrophic factor, also known as BDNF.

And BDNF is involved in synaptic plasticity, which means that it supports the growth and strengthening of neural connections. When you're studying and you're trying to learn complex new material, you are literally modifying and building synaptic connections. Neuroplasticity is the process that allows that to happen.
So when you exercise, you're increasing your cerebral blood flow, which enhances oxygen delivery and upregulates. BDNF studies also show improvements in executive function. So things like attention, working memory, and cognitive flexibility after moderate aerobic activity. So moderate activity means that it could be 20 to 30 minutes of moderate movement.

Say something like a brisk walk, maybe a light jog, a bit of cycling. These can all prime your brain for better learning and function. Say from a more practical perspective, something you could do is a 20 minute walk before heavy revision session. You short movement breaks between your study blocks instead of scrolling on your phone or schedule exercise earlier in the day to improve your studying during the day.

8 - Try Not to STRESS

And tip number eight, our final tip is to manage your stress. Obviously,

this can be a bit, uh, condescending when you're facing exams and you are stressed, but. Let's talk about the psychology of why it is actually beneficial for you. There's strong research showing that chronic exposure to elevator cord so affect your hippocampus, which as we said before, is central to your memory formation and information retrieval.

Short term stress can obviously sharpen your alertness. So if you have an exam in an hour, a small stress response can actually increase your focus and improve your performance in that exam. So it's not always a terrible thing to be a bit stressed, but prolonged stress, weeks of poor sleep, irregular eating, constant anxiety, these things are gonna impair your ability to encode and retrieve information.

There are imaging studies showing that chronic stress is associated with reduced hippocampal plasticity. So basically the system you rely on to store and retrieve information becomes much less efficient. And this is really relevant in exam season because obviously many students unknowingly kind of, or knowingly actually sit in a state of sustained stress for weeks.

You can be studying really hard and. Simultaneously making your memory formation and information retention much worse. Obviously, I'm not suggesting you try and eliminate stress entirely. It's pretty unrealistic, but small regulation practices can make a difference. So things that activate your parasympathetic nervous system help to counterbalance these sympathetic activation and increased cortisol.

So what you could do in your revision weeks are two minutes of slow control breathing before starting revision block. So, for example, you can use box breathing and that is breathe in for four seconds, hold for four, breathe out for four, and then hold for four. You could go for a short walk outside , eating regular balanced meals and not running on caffeine and energy drinks.

And sugar is obviously a really great way to reduce your cortisol. And maintaining some social contact instead of isolating yourself completely. So maybe meet a friend for coffee and a walk, or just meet up with a study group and mix your social connection time with some study time. If you're feeling a little bit behind.
Obviously you're not aiming to feel like the most zen person who's ever lived, but we can try and minimize consistent underlying stress from impacting your brain's ability to consolidate information.

What to NOT do

So before we finish, let's talk about five things that you should absolutely not be doing if you want to study more effectively. Number one, stop relying on passive rereading. Rereading your notes is probably the most common revision strategy, and the problem is that it mainly strengthens your familiarity with the concept, not actually your understanding or testing your recall.

So when you reread, the information is right in front of you, you recognize it. Recognition creates a sense of fluency and. Familiarity. It feels easier. It feels like you're learning the information, but recognition is not the same as recall. And in an exam, the information is not in front of you. You do have to recall it.
So if rereading is your warmup, that's fine, but do not make it your main revision strategy. Number two, stop relying on your highlighter. Highlighting feels really active. It feels like you're doing something. Your hand is moving. The page looks different afterwards, you have achieved something, but highlighting does not require deep understanding unless you're doing it strategically.

For example, to identify a concept before summarizing it. You are not engaging your elaborative, encoding, or retrieval processes. The Dun Lasky review, which is a big juicy study into the efficacy of different study methods, has ranked highlighting as a low utility strategy. It basically is just pretty inefficient, and there are much better and more effective uses of your study time, so don't waste it with your highlighter.

Number three, stop cramming subjects, or just actually stop cramming at all blocked revision. And doing one subject intensely in a single block produces your really good, strong short-term memory, but without space repetition, that memory is going to decline really rapidly. As we said before with ebbing house's forgetting curve.

So in your brain, you are strengthening retrieval in the short term, but you're not building your durable, long term memory. You feel really confident at the end of the day, but next week much of it is gonna be faded. You'll basically wasted about 80% of your time as you won't remember the majority of what you've learned.
Number four is to stop pulling. Allnighters. Sleep deprivation affects both your encoding and consolidation capacity.

If you stay up late trying to squeeze in extra hours, your hippocampus is less efficient. The next day you may cover more content, but the quality of your learning has dropped massively and you don't commit what you have already learned into your long-term memory. So your vision has been a massive waste of time.

Number five is to stop doing study marathons. 10 or 12 hour study days feel like they could be super productive. But your attention, your working memory, and executive function do not last for prolonged periods of such high intense effort. After several hours, you are gonna be rereading, zoning out, or not processing information properly at all.

So use shorter structured blocks with periods for retrieval and periods for breaks. Basically quality over quantity.

Key Points

I really enjoyed this episode. I really enjoyed researching this. I think so many of us we're never taught how memory actually works. You were taught to work hard, to put the hours in, to feel overwhelmed and assume that that means that we are doing well.

But learning, especially at the level that you working at in vet school, really needs to be organized. It needs to be intentional, and you need to understand how to hack your brain to study better. So let's go through our tips that we should be doing all over again. So number one is the space your revision out. Remember ebbing house's, forgetting curve, and make sure that you recall information a day after you've learned it. Then a week and then two weeks. Tip number two is to mix up the subjects you're advising. Mixing things up trains your brain to recognize topics and how they interconnect, which helps you understand questions better in your exams.

Number three, actually understand what you're learning. Elaborative and encoding and deep understanding builds those neural networks and makes information much harder for you to forget. Tip number four, use active recall. Test yourself. Find the gaps in your knowledge. Know what you don't know so you can target your studying.

Number five is to manage your cognitive load. Do not overwhelm your brain with huge amounts of information. Do not multitask. Limit your distractions, turn your notifications off. Find a quiet space, focus and build on your learning in steps. Number six is to sleep. Sleep is essential for committing short-term memory into long-term memory and for making your brain more efficient the next day.

Number seven, exercise boosts your brain. Short periods of moderate aerobic activity, boost production of BDNF, which improves your brain's capacity to learn. And finally, tip number eight is to manage your stress. Cortisol impairs how your hippocampus functions. So take breaks, see friends, have a routine, manage your stress and make studying more effective if you're a few weeks out from exams.

Don't try to overhaul your life this evening. Pick one thing, maybe start spacing. Maybe start doing a session of mixed exam questions this week. Maybe try and improve your sleep. You do not need to suddenly become the most disciplined person. But understanding how the brain builds memories means that you can align a couple of your daily habits and improve your studying.

Outro

I hope you found this really useful and are able to take something away from this that will genuinely help with your revision. And if you have an exam coming up, good luck. If you found this helpful, please share it with a friend who also has their exams coming up, or find us on Instagram and TikTok at Veterinary Vista to let us know if you want to hear more episodes like this in the future.

We'll see you next time.