How to Learn Better: What Science Says About Studying Effectively
- Liv
- 1 day ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
I have a confession to make - I struggled academically during high school. And not because I didn’t care. I wasn’t rebellious or disengaged, if anything, I was a bit of a nerd. I worked hard, spent hours studying (sometimes well into the night), and genuinely tried. Yet my results didn’t always reflect the effort I was putting in.
At the same time, one of my closest friends had a strict rule: no studying after dinner. Evenings were for relaxing. I couldn’t understand how that was possible. I was working late into the night while she was watching a new series. And yet, she finished in the top three of our high school cohort.
It wasn’t until I became a teacher that things finally clicked. Watching some of my students work such long hours without getting rewarded for their efforts really made me wonder what was going on. How could I help them?
After diving deeply into the science of learning, memorisation and language acquisition, here are the things that I wish I had been told about at school.
1. Scope Your Learning (Understand the Big Picture)
Don’t miss the forest from the trees.
Scoping is about stepping back and asking a simple but important question:
Where does this new piece of information fit?
Learning is not about stacking isolated facts on top of each other. It’s about connecting new information to what you already know. The brain learns by association. The more links you create, the stronger and more retrievable the memory becomes.
A useful way to think about this is as an inner library. Every time you learn something new, your brain is trying to decide: Which section does this belong to? Which bookshelf? Which page does it connect to? If the information has no clear place to go, it’s much harder to conceptualise it, to store it and even harder to retrieve later.
This is why understanding the big picture first is so important. When you know why you are learning something and how it fits into a broader structure, your brain has a framework to attach details to.
In practice
Get an overview
Familiarise yourself with the end-of-year exam, assessment criteria, and course structure.
Ask: What am I working towards? How will this be assessed?
Actively connect new knowledge to old knowledge
Before learning something new, ask:
What does this remind me of? Where have I seen this before? Does it contradict any other information I have?
Use mind maps to visualise connections
Mind maps help you see both the big picture and the details. Most importantly, they turn isolated ideas into a connected network.
In practice - for French learning!
Expand vocabulary through word families:
long → allonger → s’allonger → une longueur → longuement → long comme le bras…
You can create mind maps for common tasks such as persuasive essays and include things like:
Text formats (speech, articles…)
Useful expressions
Key grammatical structures
High-value verbs/vocabulary
When you encounter a challenging skill (let’s say… subjunctive tense), think about which structures you are more likely to use and which ones are less important. Some structures are extremely common in VCE (such as “il faut que + subj.”), others are good to know for the oral exam (je ne pense pas que), and many can be left out.
2. Active Recall
Memory is built by retrieval, not re-reading
If you remember one thing from this article, make it this:
👉You don’t memorize by re-reading. You do by retrieving. Active recall is the process of strengthening memory by deliberately retrieving information from your brain. There’s a misleading idea that if we want to memorise something in the long term we need to get it “in” our brain. In reality, we need to learn to repeatedly get it “out”. It is the constant effort of retrieving an information that makes it stick better.
What active recall can look like
In the context of your revisions, active recall can take many different forms.
Flashcards
Quizzes
Brain dumps (write everything you remember on a topic)
Answering questions & creating your own answer sheet
Explain the concept to a friend
Read your notes, then close your laptop and see how much of it you remember
The Feynman Method
take a pencil and a piece of paper
Write everything you know about the topic you want to learn
Explain it in simple, clear and concise way, as if teaching a child. When you have to use simple vocabulary you can’t hide behind complex and confusing words.
Notice gaps or confusion and review what’s unclear.
Come back to your piece of paper and refine it with your new knowledge. Challenge yourself to simplify everything to a maximum!
Things that studies have proven to be less effective (passive studying)
Highlighting notes
Copying summaries
Rewriting vocab lists
Over using Google (when you rush to Google something you have forgotten, you’re missing out an opportunity to try retrieve it yourself and thus strengthening your memory of it).
As a general rule… the more effortful it is for your brain, the more you’re helping information sticks.
3. The Forgetting Curve & Spaced Repetition
Memories fade fast, spacing your practice is how you make them last.
In the 19th century, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus set out to understand how memory works by learning lists of meaningless syllables. What he discovered was: when new information isn’t connected to anything we already know, it disappears fast. More than half of it is forgotten within an hour, nearly two-thirds after a day, and even more a few days later.
But Ebbinghaus also noticed something crucial. Each time he relearned the same material, it stayed in his memory for longer. The first review slowed forgetting. The second slowed it even more. This led to a key insight: memory isn’t built by learning something once, but by returning to it over time.
This is the principle behind spaced repetition. Reviewing information at increasing intervals gives your brain repeated chances to retrieve it. The moment learning feels slightly effortful is exactly when it becomes effective. Reviewing something three times in one hour may feel productive, but it doesn’t challenge your memory enough to make it last.
Spaced repetition in practice
Spaced repetition means revisiting content just as you’re about to forget it:
Day 1 - Learn it once
Day 1 - Review it later the same day
Day 3 - Revisit it a few days later
Day 7 - Revisit again a week or two later
Day 21 - Revisit one last time (and if you get it wrong, start the process from the beginning)
Each time you retrieve the information with a bit of effort, you reinforce it. That’s how short-term learning turns into long-term memory.
PS: Flashcard apps do this automatically. If you get a flashcard wrong it will show it to you again within minutes. If you get it right, it will increase the interval until you get asked about it again.
Why students forget and what you can do about it
How to Study for Exams - Spaced Repetition | Evidence-based revision tips
4. Beat Procrastination
You don’t procrastinate because you’re lazy. You procrastinate because starting feels uncomfortable.
Starting a task often triggers stress and discomfort. Learning something new actually activates areas of the brain associated with effort and even mild pain. Why is that? Well, our brain was wired to fight mammoth and thus using our energy for any other task is something the brain actively fights against. So how do we fight it?
The biggest challenge is to start. Once we start, we can build on the momentum.
How to get started?
Define the next tiny action
Vague tasks like “revise French” create avoidance. Instead, find the tiniest next step to get you started:
→ Open Quizlet
→ Get a pen
→ Find the book you need
Small actions reduce resistance.
The 2 minutes rule
Commit to just two minutes of doing the task. If you want to give up after 2 minutes, you give yourself permission to do so. But in most cases you’ll realize that after 2 minutes, you’ll have overcome the initial difficulty and will naturally continue.
Do it imperfectly
Our brain is better at criticizing, improving, changing and working on something that already exists rather than creating it from scratch. If we can’t get ourselves to start because we can feel it won’t be perfect - commit to do it imperfectly. Even if it’s ugly, terrible, whatever.
Can’t start a French essay? Write something silly and full of mistakes first. “Cette première phrase est nulle et à beaucoup d’erreurs.” Inspiration comes with action. Get the ball rolling :)
“You are better off starting imperfectly than being paralysed by the hope or delusion of perfection.”
Starting will keep you rolling!
The Zeigarnik Effect -
In the 1920s, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that waiters remembered orders better when they were unfulfilled.
This prompted her to research this topic and her findings were fascinating.
People remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than complete ones because they stay in the back of our minds. Starting a new task is like opening a new tab in your mind - and even if you move on to something else, it still stays opened. This is why simply starting often leads to momentum.
The writer Ernest Hemingway used this effect intuitively. He would stop writing mid-sentence before going to sleep so that, the next morning, his brain was already engaged and eager to continue.
Your brain seeks closure… so use it to your advantage!
5. Motivation Comes and Goes — Systems Matter More
Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. — Bill Gates
We only need motivation for things we don’t want to do. Motivation is unreliable. It appears at the beginning of something new, when novelty creates excitement and dopamine, and then it fades as effort and difficulty appear. This is not a personal failure, it’s how the brain works.
When a behaviour is built into a system—through routines, environment design, and small, repeatable actions—it becomes automatic and sustainable over time. Instead of chasing bursts of motivation, you focus on creating conditions that make the right actions easy. That’s why successful learners don’t rely on motivation. They rely on systems. Don’t focus on the results but rather on the processes you can put in place.
There’s another important reason systems matter: multitasking doesn’t work. Research by Clifford Nass at Stanford showed that frequent multitaskers are worse at focusing, filtering irrelevant information and switching tasks effectively. Multitasking is in fact incredibly inefficient. Our brains was never wired to this level of multitasking. We live in a world where it’s normal to write an essay while listening to music and keeping Instagram open and quickly respond to your friend’s messages… Clifford Nass discovered that multitasking isn’t a skill we can improve on. It divides your brain’s attention and it takes more cognitive effort to switch back and forth between two things than it would to just pick one and get it done (about 23 minutes to get back your maximal focus after switching tasks)!
In practice
Build simple, realistic systems
Monday: listen to one short podcast
Tuesday: create or review flashcards
Wednesday: write 5 sentences using new structures
Thursday: revise corrections
Friday: short speaking practice
Protect your attention
Use app blockers or put your phone in another room!
Try the Pomodoro technique
25 minutes of focused work
5-minute break
Repeat
Book “Atomic Habits” (or any summary of it on YouTube will do!)
Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
6. Chunk Information to Learn Faster
The human brain can only hold a few items in working memory at once.
Your working memory is limited. When too much information is presented at once, learning slows down or stops altogether. This is known as cognitive overload.
Chunking helps by grouping information into meaningful units, allowing your brain to process several elements as one. Instead of remembering many separate pieces, you remember a single “chunk”.
In practice
Simple example
Which number sequence is easier to remember?
1–9–3–9–1–9–4–5
8-2-3-0-9-1-7-4
It’s the same amount of numbers yet in the first example, you only have to remember 2 elements (1939 & 1945). In the second example, you have to memorize 8. By grouping the information, you free your brain from overload.
Chunking In languages
Find frequent or high value structures to memorise. Instead of learning word by word:
je / suis / allée / en / France
Learn the whole chunk:
Je suis allée en France.
This will be much easier than having to remember
word order,
which auxiliary goes with “aller” in the passe composé,
which preposition to use in front of a feminine country, etc.
Learning in chunks reduces cognitive load, improves fluency and helps your sentences come out more naturally in exams.
7. Immerse Yourself
You don't notice what you're not looking for
Immersion doesn’t necessarily mean living in France or watching the news every night.
It can also mean adding French to your everyday life in enjoyable ways. Beyond the obvious benefits of hearing and listening to your target language more, something else happens with immersion.
In everyday life, your brain constantly filters information from the millions of sensory inputs it receives. When something becomes relevant to you, your brain starts paying attention to it. This is linked to the reticular activating system (RAS) — the part of your brain that decides what information is worth noticing.
The perfect example of this is when when you decide to buy a certain pair of shoes and suddenly see them everywhere — your brain hasn’t changed the world, it has changed what it notices.
When French becomes part of your environment, your brain starts noticing patterns, sounds and words more — even without conscious effort.
In practice
Create light, enjoyable immersion
Listen to a podcast you genuinely like
Watch YouTube videos you’d already watch — but in French
Replay songs you enjoy and absorb recurring phrases
This isn’t about studying harder. It’s about training your attention so French becomes familiar, predictable and easier to process over time.
The more your brain notices French, the more natural learning becomes.
BonjourATAR got you covered :)
If you’d like to start applying these ideas straight away, I’ve created a free list of French podcasts, organised by level, to help you build listening skills and immerse yourself in the language without it feeling like study.
And if you’re preparing for French VCE, my French VCE Program is built entirely around the science of learning — active recall, spaced repetition, chunking and immersion — to help students work efficiently, stay consistent and make real progress.
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