Studying smart depends on the student’s metacognition, comprehension, and study skills. However, incorporating strategies like desirable difficulties and spaced repetition can help learners study...
Studying smart depends on the student’s metacognition, comprehension, and study skills. However, incorporating strategies like desirable difficulties and spaced repetition can help learners study less and remember more.
Students often experience psychological stress and attention deficits, especially in high-stakes exams. To counter these worries and improve their cognition, we have compiled twelve memorisation strategies from Marty Lobdell’s book Study Less, Study Smart.
Of course, each student has different mental capabilities and reinforcements, so a one-size-fits-all approach can’t work here. We are sure that when you complete reading this article and implement these techniques, your studying style will be completely changed for the better.
Remember, taking action is compulsory because if knowledge does not change your attitude, you don’t have it. On this note, let’s explore these powerful strategies by Professor Emeritus Marty Lobdell, one of America’s most experienced and thoughtful psychologists.
To study smart, you need to adopt advanced learning styles as well as take care of your health, diet, and mindset. You can use learning aids like flashcards to enhance your memorisation. Now, let’s discuss the learning strategies you can incorporate to study smart.
Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning system where students review the lessons at increasing intervals, e.g., 1 day, 7 days, and 16 days after the lesson.
Pro tip from Marty Lobdell: revising the lessons right after the lesson can be more effective because students often don’t understand their own notes if they do not go through them instantly.
Spaced repetition learning techniques are quite attractive for teachers and students because they improve long-term memory recall. They're pretty different from other learning methods like rote learning and cramming because they significantly reduce the time spent and play a crucial role in memory improvement.
Discover practical techniques to make your study sessions productive.
The purpose of the desirable difficulties learning model was to challenge the rote learning systems and enhance long-term learning. This model distinguishes cramming, where students perform well in tests but can’t describe the key concepts or recall them later from the conceptual learning.
Meanwhile, the desirable difficulties approach compromises short-term performance and focus on durable learning. Desirable difficulties expose students to the study materials over the course to improve their recall abilities.
Students always struggle to find better learning strategies where they study smart and effectively. So, we decided to solve their problem and compiled this article with the help of strategies discussed in Marty Lobdell’s book Study Less, Study Smart. Without further ado, let’s dive deeper into these powerful strategies.
Major Smart Study Tactics:
Without further ado, let’s dive deeper into these powerful strategies.
According to “Reinforcement vs. Punishment Psychology,” we do fewer things that are punished while we do more things that are reinforced. A typical college freshman can only keep his focus and actually learn what he is reading for 25-30 minutes.
Marty Lobdell quotes a story about her friend who decided to study straight for 6 hours a day. Do you think she was equally effective in learning compared to the first 25-30 minutes? No, she would have been just staring at the books and learning nothing and ultimately failed her semester, getting a 0.00 GPA. On the other hand, if she had taken even 5-minute breaks after every 30 minutes of studying, she would have actually studied for 5.5 hours of full effectiveness.
That’s why you are advised not to treat your study as punishment but to reward yourself with something nice for learning for 30 minutes. It might be five minutes of talking to a friend or family or playing with a cat, anything you enjoy the most. When you are done with the study for the day, reward yourself with something nice like eating your favourite food.
Our environment impacts our behaviour. Have you ever thought when a question is asked in a class, hands go up instantly? Why don’t go up on a question when you are home or with friends? Environmental impact! Many students study in their bedrooms; remember, every place moulds our behaviours to their primary functions.
What’s the primary function of a bedroom? Sleeping right? That’s why your bed calls you, and you sleep without completing your assignments. Have you ever craved food when you study at the kitchen desk? Those brownies and sandwiches call you until you do not eat them. Similarly, studying in a family area like a lounge room, sitting on a comfy sofa. This environment will only add to your procrastination or make you sleep. It can’t make you complete your assignments.
You are advised to create a separate study area other than these places, or you can drive to a nearby library to avoid distractions. If you can’t arrange that, then you can create a study environment in your bedroom, i.e. you keep a lamp and put a tag on it study lamp; when you turn it on, start studying and turn it off when you are done. You would also turn it off in breaks you take every 30 minutes. If you can not find a suitable area, you can get homework help to get along with your class.
Optimising your learning experience is another study smart hack discussed by Marty Lobdell in Study Smart, Study Less. True learning changes your behaviour. If you learn something that does not change your behaviour, you don’t learn anything, and that’s a psychological fact.
Optimising the learning experience means everyone has a different cognitive system, so each student has a different comprehension. However, it’s not just the learning style; each topic might require a different approach. Students need to optimise which topics require which learning style. For example, rote learning (memorisation through repetition) might work for facts but can’t be implemented for concepts.
Moreover, the more active you are in learning, the more you learn. Marty Lobel used to have a conversation with himself about the topic he learned. So, trying different approaches and actively learning can help you find the learning style that suits you the best.
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Consult with an Expert, It's freeSQ3R is a reading comprehension method and includes 5 steps: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review. This method suggests that students go through each step. This is how you can learn comprehensively using these steps.
These steps include doing a survey of the textbook before studying it. While doing the survey, you will analyse the images and infographics. After analysing those images, you will move to the second step, which is question, ask questions about those images, “What does this represent?” and “What does that mean?”. These questions will now spark curiosity, and you try to find answers, just like newspapers.
To find answers to those questions, you will read the textbook comprehensively. Once you read the book, memorise the answers you found and try to recall to ensure it’s recollection and not the recognition. Finally, before your test, you should review your lesson so that you don't forget anything.
Students should discuss everyday topics with their parents, or they can discuss them with some close friends or classmates. Group studies can be very helpful in this regard. It also gives you a study environment, which we discussed earlier, and how it can benefit you. Plus, classmates can have a discussion about the topic; if one is stuck somewhere, the other one can clear his confusion.
When you learn in this engaging way, you can not forget the concepts and topics. You’ll remember them for a lifetime because when you learn in a group or active learning environment, your mind actually attaches stories to that understanding. The human brain mostly does not forget stories or events; remember, stories are stored in the subconscious mind and can be the best way of learning.
Now, the question is, how can you learn conceptually? The answer is simple: You first need to decide what you are learning. Ask yourself, am I learning a fact or a concept? Should we differentiate fact from concept? “Sigmund Freud is the father of psychoanalysis” That’s a fact.
But if you do not understand psychoanalysis, you give it a damn, right? Will you remember this fact? Might not. So, what’s the way out to study smart? Of course, by learning about psychoanalysis, you will ultimately understand his role in the subject and will remember the above fact as well. Moreover, if you can’t describe a concept in your own words, you haven’t learned it.
Now, you might be thinking, what if I need to remember a fact? Here is the math: You should ask leading questions about that fact, for example. Suppose you need to remember the name of a bone. You can raise questions like “What is its primary function?” and “How does it work?” These questions will lead you towards conceptual learning. You can also use Mnemonics to remember the facts.
Have you ever learned that you can take letters and form a word of it, using those letters to remember certain facts? This is an effective study smart hack. Here is a popular mnemonic to remember the names of the planets.
Although the pizzas are no longer there, Plato is no longer a planet and was reclassified as a dwarf planet.
However, you can use Mnemonics as a tool to learn facts. Another example is the word “ROYGBIV,” which represents the colours of a rainbow.
Apart from using letters to form words, there are three other types of mnemonics that can help the learning process align with your comprehension.
Acronyms are just the abbreviations of the words (taking the first letter of each word). To make your study more active, you can take the first letters of words of facts you need to remember and make some interesting acronyms. Take the example of Afferent and efferent students, flip-flopping them all the time, which is sensory and motor. Morty told his students that both are “SAME,” i.e., Sensory are Afferent, and motors are Efferent.
Have you ever heard of the phrase “righty tighty, lefty loosey”? Do you know this saying is used to remember the direction a standard screw, nut, or bolt is tightened or loose? This saying helps to remember that one has to turn the nut right to tighten it and left to lose it. That’s interesting, isn’t it?
Interactive images are the syllables of words; Marty quotes a woman who was bad at remembering things. She struggled to remember the facts about nutrition, like how many calories are in 1 gram of carbohydrates. He told her she could remember it as Car-bo-hyd-rates. This word has four parts, and so do the calories.
Rote learning is a method of memorisation through repetition in which students keep reading the resources repeatedly without understanding the concepts. The biggest flaw of rote learning is that it goes in a loop.
This loop works like this: You learn something, you prepare it before exams again, and then you forget. Some students can’t even recall it in exams, and others can't remember it after that. This learning adds no value to the student’s life and career.
Here is the visual representation of the rote learning loop.
Improve your planning, concentration, and revision habits with simple strategies.
As an experiment, Marty divided his class into two groups. One group was advised to memorise how many vowels are used in certain words like water and elephant. The other group was instructed to analyse the importance of the same things if you are stuck on a deserted island and rate their importance from 1 to 5.
Then, he gave them an activity to write down their names and addresses to change their focus. After 30 seconds, he asked them to write down those words. Interestingly, the first group could recall only 5 out of 30 words. On the other hand, the second group could write down 10 things out of those 30. This exercise demonstrates how short-term memory lasts only 30 seconds and fades away quickly if the lesson is not meaningful.
Have you ever used highlighters to highlight the important things in your lesson? Do you think that helps you study smart? Students often fill their books with different colours, but they can not recall them while writing their exams. If they see them again, they would be like, “Ah, I remember it.” No, you do not remember; you just recognise it.
Instead of filling your books with dirty orange notes, you should revise them right after class. Have you noticed that you forget your notes if you read them after a long time? You go, “What was that?” To avoid this situation, you should spend 5 minutes right after the class you took notes for. You will become familiar with them. Now, follow the spaced repetition approach to remember them.
The human brain possesses excellent recognition skills. When students try to study the highlighted book, they recognise those terms and think they remember them. But that’s not the case; that’s not recollection, that’s recognition. As the students recognised it, they did not study that topic again.
To know whether you recognised or recollected it, when you complete reading a page, go to the previous page you read before this, and look in the sky. If you can recall it in your own words, you didn’t learn it, and you need to study it again.
Sleep is not something that makes money for someone, so we do not often listen to it digitally. But do you know? Sleep plays an important role in your smart study efforts. If you do not complete your 8 hours of sleep, you won’t get enough “REM.” For your understanding, REM stands for “Rapid Eye Movement” It is basically a brain’s function to store and consolidate information.
REM is part of the sleep cycle where your memory gets permanent. Ultimately, If you do not get 8 hours of sleep, your sleep cycle isn’t complete, and memory does not get permanent. Moreover, lack of sleep can cause permanent cognitive decline and dementia.
This image shows what a sleep cycle includes:
To wrap up the smart study guide, there are multiple ways you can adopt as a student to achieve your goal of studying less and remembering more. To make this happen, The Academic Papers UK has compiled this guide, which explains major learning psychologies like spaced repetition, desirable difficulties, and more.
In this article, we have provided ten memorising strategies from Marty Lobdell’s book Study Less, Study Smart. We have also explained learning systems like rote learning, mnemonics, and the SQ3R method.
The purpose of this article is to provide students with learning guidelines and assist them in studying and memorising better. We hope this guide will help students comprehend their coursework better.
If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the Cite this article button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.
Vickie Elmore (July 17, 2019). How to Study Smart? 10 Powerful Strategies to Study Less & Remember More Retrieved October 9, 2026, from https://www.theacademicpapers.co.uk/blog/2019/07/17/how-to-study-smart-hacks-2019/
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