Active Recall- The High Utility Technique YOU should be Using to revise.

If you are reading this post it must be because rereading, highlighting and summarising aren’t effective methods of revising for you, right?

The most effective method I have personally come across receives the name of Active recall.

Numerous studies have demonstrated how people how used this technique would remember things more easily in 100% of the cases in comparison to more conventional techniques.

Active recall is based on spaced repetition, which uses your long term memory skills to make learning more interesting and rewarding. It basically consists on reading through things once, then produce questions or flashcards manually or digitally and start looking at them and dividing them into how easy it was to remember them, easy,medium, super hard and then revise the ones which were super hard more often than the ones that were easy for you and that are already in your brain.

But how can I introduce Active Recall into my study routine?

There are two ways I use active recall to revise,

1. Ask questions, you can use a platform like google sheets or excel to produce an A4 paper with two sections, questions and answers and then print them and fold the paper so in one side you have your questions and in the other side your answers, you can also do it digitally, you can also add three emoji, smiley, normal, sad and color each question to know which ones you don’t know well

2. Flashcards, this is my favorite study method, if you want some physics flashcards look at my post on 175 physics flashcards and others to see the type of flashcards I do. I use quizlet as it is really easy to search in the internet for “topic” Quizlet flashcards and then customize them, it is free and has a very beautiful interface but if you do want to pay which I recommend as you can download flashcards and add images (I have the premium version and if you like Quizlet it really helps). You can also look platforms like google slides or anKi which are very similar and some websites like physicsandmathstutor.com use google slides to produce flashcards ready for you.

If you want to learn more about this method check out this video from Ali Abdaal who has an incredible channel with lots of revision tips and tech reviews.

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Check this article to look closer into this topic:

https://aliabdaal.com/guide/study/activerecallstudytechnique/