Study Tips & Tricks

Active recall is a learning technique that involves actively engaging your memory and brain to maximize your learning and long-term memory of concepts and information. As I mentioned before, study techniques like reading over your notes and watching lessons are forms of passive review. Passive review involves very little action and instead relies on indirect memorization. Active recall is the exact opposite of passive review. With active recall, you are learning actively. When using active recall, you are constantly retrieving information from your memory. Instead of passively allowing information to sit in the back of your mind, you go and grab that information and place it right into your memory.

The most common form of active recall is asking yourself questions. Numerous scientific studies have shown that testing can greatly increase the long-term retention of understanding. To put it into perspective, imagine you are trying to learn a problem-solving concept in math. Your math teacher has posted a lesson demonstrating how the concept works and shows you an example. When you are passively learning, you would just watch the lesson and stop there. When using active recall, you would watch the lesson, then find questions that utilize that concept, and continuously practice them day after day. Therefore, you are forced to retrieve the information you learned in the video and apply it. Once you actively answer the practice questions, anytime you are given a question of the same sort, you will easily be able to solve it. Let’s look at it a different way for a fact-based class, history. For example, you are learning about World War 2, and you have listened to a long lecture and taken pages of notes. Do not just stop there. Close your notes, and ask yourself questions about the topic, like “when did the war start?” and “why did it start?”. For problem-solving classes, active recall focuses on understanding the concept, not memorization. Do not just answer the question. Understand why. Understanding a concept is like riding a bicycle. Once you learn how, it is extremely difficult to forget.

There are many ways to do active recall. Firstly, you can try the closed-book technique. Close your textbook, videos, lessons, and any other resources. Then, using only your own knowledge, write detailed notes for the topic. Write as much as you possibly can, and fill in the missing spots with your resources. Or, you can simply say the information out loud. Another way is through flashcards. When using flashcards, you are forced to retrieve information to answer the question on the card. If you don’t know the answer, read the back of the flashcard and try it again later. Also, one of my favourite methods is filling in the blanks. To do this, write out information about the topic but leave the key parts blank. Then, you go through and fill in the blanks. The great thing about active recall is that you can do it anywhere. You do not even need paper. For example, when waiting in line, ask yourself a question and answer it in your head. These are only some of the innumerable ways to use active recall.