My Religion 101 class involves a lot of memorization. While most students enter the class knowing, at least vaguely, some stories about Noah, Moses, David, and maybe Jonah, they often find that Jeroboam son of Nebat, Jehu, Ahaz, Hezekiah, Tiglath-pileser III, Sennacherib, Manasseh, Josiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others have completely escaped their notice (or at least their memory). My most basic goal in Religion 101 is to elevate my students’ biblical literacy above their starting point. To that end, I do test my students over names, dates, the contents of biblical books, and so on. By the end of the semester, I expect students to be able to identify a fairly significant number of biblical characers and historical Ancient Near Eastern figures, to distinguish the contents of about twenty biblical books from each other, to handle the standard chronology’s timeline of Judean and Israelite history with some facility, and so on. All of this makes Religion 101 a fairly data-driven course, and it requires memorization.

In class on Friday, I conducted a brief study session for the final examination. After giving students some basic information about the format and scope of the exam, I had them take out a blank sheet of paper or open a blank word processing document and write down the names of all the biblical books they remembered studying this semester. After reviewing the list with them, I had them go back and add brief descriptions beside each book’s name. Then they spent a little time helping each other fill in gaps. We repeated this process with the names of biblical characters, and I recommended that students repeat the process again with technical terminology (tetragrammaton, theodicy, theophany, election, and so on) in their own study.

As you might expect, some students bought into the exercise, and some groaned as they did it. (Some did both.) I like to justify this study technique to students using the analogy of a batting doughnut (resistance ring). You can often see baseball players warming up before their turn at bat swinging bats with these doughnuts or resistance rings attached to them, helping them to loosen their muscles and prepare to bat with the power and speed they need. I advise my students to study as if the test will be harder than it will really be; if they do this successfully, they will find the test easier.

Today, the digital version of the May 1 Chronicle of HIgher Education went live for subscribers, and one of the headlines confirms the value of this study strategy. For more details, follow me past the jump.
David Glenn’s article on “active recall” begins as follows:

The scene: A rigorous intro-level survey course in biology, history, or economics. You’re the instructor, and students are crowding the lectern, pleading for study advice for the midterm.

If you’re like many professors, you’ll tell them something like this: Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. Make an outline. Reread each chapter.

That’s not terrible advice. But some scientists would say that you’ve left out the most important step: Put the book aside and hide your notes. Then recall everything you can. Write it down, or, if you’re uninhibited, say it out loud.

Two psychology journals have recently published papers showing that this strategy works, the latest findings from a decades-old body of research. When students study on their own, “active recall” — recitation, for instance, or flashcards and other self-quizzing — is the most effective way to inscribe something in long-term memory.

Students will often come to me after a low test grade or two (some wait too long!) and ask me for study advice. I often respond by asking those students to describe their own prior study techniques. Frequently, students will talk about how much time they spend reading and re-reading their assigned materials and their class notes. Unfortunately, nobody has previously clued these students in to the perils of rereading:

A central idea of Mr. McDaniel’s work, which appears in the April issue of Psychological Science and the January issue of Contemporary Educational Psychology, is that it is generally a mistake to read and reread a textbook passage. That strategy feels intuitively right to many students — but it’s much less effective than active recall, and it can give rise to a false sense of confidence.

“When you’ve got your chemistry book in front of you, everything’s right there on the page, it’s all very familiar and fluent,” says Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University and lead author of a paper in the May issue of Memory about students’ faulty intuitions about effective study habits.

“So you could say to yourself, ‘Yeah, I know this. Sure, this is all very familiar,’” Mr. Karpicke continues. “But of course, when you go in to take a classroom test, or in real life when you need to reconstruct your knowledge, the book’s not there. In our experiments, when students repeatedly read something, it falsely inflates their sense of their own learning.”

The research reviewed in Glenn’s article points to the importance of active studying. Reading and rereading textbooks and class notes can end up being fundamentally passive activities. I advise students to create and use flash cards to help them learn who’s who in the Tanakh—but also to throw their flash cards up in the air and then rearrange the resulting mess into the storyline sequence of the Torah and Former Prophets. I advise students to create and use flash cards to help them properly associate biblical materials with the books that contain those materials (so they will know how to find things later)—but also to throw those cards up in the air and sort the result mess into Torah, Nevi’im, and Kethuvim.

In the words of Glenn’s title, “Close the book. Recall. Write it down.” It’s a simple study technique that many students overlook. If you have found other active study techniques helpful, please describe them in the comments.