The Long Game

24 March 2022

I’m in the middle of our teaching semester right now, and the question first year University students keep asking me is “how should I be studying?”. On YouTube there appeared to be two “universally” agreed upon studying techniques – Active Recall and Spaced Repetition. Both Active Recall and Spaced Repetition are targeted towards remembering large volumes of information. It’s not a shortcut, and actually take a lot of effort to maintain over an extended period of time. Teachers don’t talk about these techniques because we know memorising is not the same as learning. In science, you simply can’t memorise everything because the knowledge is always changing.