Introduction:

Let’s picture this for a moment. Your math test is coming up in the morning. It’s a big test, your whole grade for the class hinges on your score. You’ve done the homework, and now you’re rereading the textbook for the umpteenth time, highlighting and praying that something sticks. You feel like the material is familiar. You feel like you’re remembering more and more. Finally, you nod off around 1am only to awake at 8 and realize you have to rush to make it to school on time. When you look at the first problem on the test, it sounds familiar, but you can’t remember how to answer the question. You pound your head with your fists as you desperately try to remember the page in the textbook where you highlighted this exact information, but it doesn’t come. Finally, you give up and write down something that’s vaguely related, and you move on. When the test score comes back the results aren’t pretty. What happened? You studied all night for that test. What went wrong?

The problem is that we have been told that brains just need to be exposed to something enough times to remember it. Traditional study methods have us repeating the same types of problems over and over. Or we reread the textbook until our eyes bleed, highlighting everything. Or we rewatch a lecture, hoping that the more times we expose our brains, the better it will remember. After all, practice makes perfect, right? Well, sort of.

Our brains will remember the things we’ve practiced, but it remembers exactly how we practiced. That means that if our practice is about getting the area of a triangle right over and over again, we’ll remember that formula while we’re doing it. But on our test, we have to remember the area of a triangle, rectangle, and circle, so it’s harder to remember which equation goes with which shape. When all the problems are mixed up you get stuck because you haven’t practiced determining which equation to use for which scenario.

What actually works? If we practice for tests by taking tests. Start with the main concepts. Can you explain each one to someone unfamiliar with the class? Then move on to problems. What kinds of questions do you imagine a teacher could ask? Write them down. Then practice and mix it up. Take different types of questions and try and answer them on your own until you get really stuck, then get just enough help to get unstuck. In this way you can practice taking tests, so that when the test comes you haven’t just trained your brain to do one type of problem it knows to look for, or to reread the textbook for hours on end. Instead, you’ve trained your brain to remember key concepts, to recognize different kinds of problems, and to figure out how to correctly answer questions about the material. On test day you’ll be able to answer any questions confidently and quickly. 

Check out our next article for more help: How to find the main concepts (and how to study with them)