This important strategy should help improve your learning efficiency and memory. It’s presented in college student context, but of course applies to anyone looking for a good study tip.

Imagine that a psychology lecture has just let out. The vast majority of students will wait several weeks to review their lecture notes. Unfortunately, when they do so, very little of what they’ve written will make sense. The notes will be difficult to follow, and the content hard to understand. They might as well be seeing the material for the first time. Why? The answer is simple: Their memory of the material has long since decayed.

Why does forgetting happen?

Most students incorrectly believe that after learning new information, they steadily forget a little bit each and every day that passes.

This is a myth. Actually, newly learned information has a relatively short half-life in your brain. This fact is demonstrated very nicely by the forgetting curve.

The forgetting curve is not a new phenomenon. German psychologists (e.g., Herman Ebbinghaus) were plotting these curves 150 years ago. Since that time, a great deal of accumulated data has supported their validity. Take a look at the forgetting curve shown here:

The peak of the curve (T) represents your memory for material immediately after the learning session—let’s say the end of a lecture. Now, we can conclude 2 things from the curve: The Obvious and the Not-so-Obvious.

The Obvious:

We can see it makes no sense to wait until midterms or final exams to do your first review (that is, to wait until Day 30 or longer on the above graph). By that time, you’ll have forgotten more than 95 percent of the material. You’ll feel as if you’re encountering the information in your notes for the first time, and what should take you only 4 minutes to review will now take you 40 minutes. The notes will look foreign because you won’t remember anything.

Not-so-Obvious:

However, there’s a more important conclusion we can reach from the curve: You don’t have to wait several weeks for this degree of forgetting to occur. Massive forgetting actually happens within hours of the initial learning session. Therefore, even those students who wait several days to review the material are in trouble! If you look carefully at the graph, you can see that even before Day 2 arrives, you will already have forgotten 40–70 percent of what you learned!

The crucial point is this: Make sure to review new material within hours of any initial learning episode.

The vast majority of students could save dozens of hours of study time per semester by using this one technique alone to markedly improve learning efficiency and memory.

Notice how a small investment up front pays huge dividends come exam time.

It is also worth noting that these recommendations apply not only to lectures, but to any academic learning—whether from a textbook, video, or computer learning session.

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