A surprisingly potent technique can boost short and long-term recall
For anybody perusing the comments here for tips on how to better learn, consider reading "Make it stick". It's a research backed book about the most effective study methods. It starts off with the most research backed and simple techniques to the more complex and less well understood learning concepts.<p>Here's the kicker: the two most common techiques, rereading and cramming, are the least effective.<p>The underlying theme about what is effective: anything you can to do to make learning take more effort, while not hindering it, generally improves it. That includes spaced repetition, practicing recall in different settings, and even something as mundane as pre-modifying the text to replace random letters with underscores. Also, testing is very important to both to measurement of learning <i>and the actual learning process itself.</i> Don't forget a proper feedback loop either.<p>Lastly, something I appreciated reading in the books was how as often as possible, there were studies done in classrooms to try to quantify how small technique and curriculum changes actually impact student learning.