Spaced Repetition

This is one of the most effective strategies, but is also takes more work. The idea is that you regularly study things, and study the things you don’t know well more often than the things you know better.

Make flashcard for everything you learn. Definitions are easy, but include other things.

  • How do you figure out how many neutrons an atom has?
  • What were the effects of the Missouri Compromise?
  • How did To Kill a Mockingbird show courage and compassion?

You have four stacks of these flashcards:

  1. Daily
  2. Twice a Week
  3. Once a Week
  4. Learned

Each card starts out in the Daily stack.

Every day, go through the Daily stack. Maybe you want to shuffle it first, maybe not. If you get it right, put the card in the Twice a Week stack. If you don’t, keep it in the Daily stack.

Twice a week (Monday and Thursday?) go through the cards that have been promoted to the Twice a Week stack. If you get a card right, it goes into the Once a Week stack. If you get it wrong, it goes back to the Daily stack.

Once a week (Wednesday?) go through the Once a Week stack. If you get it wrong, the card goes back to the Daily stack. If you get it right, put it in the Learned stack.

You don’t have to go through the cards in the Learned stack anymore. Keep them around for when you’re studying for the test.

The point of this is that you don’t need to keep going over things you understand. However, the things you have trouble with come up more often. By doing this every day, you will be doing a little bit of studying the things you need to every day. You will find that studying for test becomes a lot easier.