Top 7 Study Techniques That Actually Work for University Students

Most students arrive at university with study habits built for school exams, and those habits stop paying at degree level. Reading a chapter twice no longer holds it. This guide sets out seven techniques that do hold, what the research says about each one, and a day-by-day review schedule you can put against a real module this week.

What Are the Best Study Techniques for University Students?

The two with the strongest evidence are testing yourself from memory and spacing your reviews over days and weeks. When Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated ten common study techniques, those were the only two to earn a high-utility rating. Re-reading and highlighting, the habits most students rely on, were rated low.

Around those two, Pomodoro manages attention, diagrams handle topics that connect, the Cornell layout turns notes into questions, and explaining a topic aloud finds the gaps. Each technique below comes with the evidence for it, and the figure at the head of the list shows how that review rated all ten. If your exams are weeks away rather than a term away, how to study for university exams turns the same techniques into a four-week revision plan.

How Can You Learn Faster?

Stop re-reading and start retrieving. Read the material once, close it, and write down everything you remember. Check what you missed, then retest only the gaps at widening intervals. You learn faster because your time goes on the material you have not learned yet instead of the material you already know.

That is the whole of it, but "widening intervals" is where most students guess. Here is the schedule, tied to a single lecture. It costs about 20 minutes a day per topic.

Two rules make or break it. Write the answers down rather than deciding in your head that you know them, because recognition feels like recall and is not. And keep the gap list, because by week three the list is your revision plan and the textbook is not.

Top 7 Study Techniques that Actually Work

The Dunlosky review sorted its ten techniques into three bands. Practice testing and distributed practice rated high, because they helped learners of different ages and abilities across many kinds of test, including in real classes. Elaborative interrogation (asking yourself why a fact is true), self-explanation and interleaved practice (mixing topics in one session) rated moderate: promising, but with limited evidence, especially from real courses. Summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery for text (picturing what you read, which is not the same as drawing a diagram) and re-reading rated low, because they helped only some students on some tasks or did not consistently improve results.

Ten common study techniques by evidence rating (Dunlosky et al., 2013)

Point of comparison	High utility	Moderate utility	Low utility
Techniques rated	High utility Practice testing; distributed practice	Moderate utility Elaborative interrogation; self-explanation; interleaved practice	Low utility Summarization; highlighting; keyword mnemonic; imagery for text (picturing what you read); re-reading
Why this rating	High utility Helped learners of different ages and abilities across many kinds of test, including in real classes	Moderate utility Promising, but with limited evidence, especially from real courses	Low utility Helped only some students on some tasks, or did not consistently improve results
Where it is in this guide	High utility Technique 1 and the review schedule	Moderate utility Technique 5 (closest to self-explanation) and the day-21 mixed test (interleaving)	Low utility What the review schedule replaces

Technique 1 below puts the two high-rated techniques to work. Technique 5 is closest to self-explanation, and the day-21 mixed test in the schedule above is interleaving. Pomodoro, diagrams, note layouts and study setup are not among the ten, so each of those sections gives the evidence that does exist.

1. Active Recall and Spaced Repetition

Active recall means going through the material once and then trying to produce it from memory without looking. Osmosis, a medical-education publisher, calls it the most effective, high-yield learning technique for exactly that reason: recognizing a page is not the same as being able to write it.

Recall also tells you where you stand. The questions you cannot answer are the list you work from, so your revision time follows the gaps instead of spreading evenly across a module.

Spaced repetition is the scheduling half of the same idea: read the material once, then review it at widening intervals. If you study a topic today, test yourself tomorrow, again after three days and again after a week, which is the schedule in the table above. Each review lands while the memory is fading but not gone, and that is what makes it hold.

2. Pomodoro Technique

Fixed breaks have been tested against breaks you decide on yourself. Biwer et al. (2023) followed 87 bachelors and masters students at a Dutch university through one day of their own self-study. One group took a 6-minute break after every 24 minutes of study, a second took a 3-minute break after every 12 minutes, and a third chose its own breaks. The students who chose their own studied in longer sessions and took longer breaks, and they reported more fatigue and distraction and less concentration and motivation than the two fixed-break groups. The groups did not differ in the mental effort they put in or in how much work they completed. The authors read that as an apparent efficiency gain for fixed breaks: "similar task completion in shorter time".

In the classic version of the technique you focus for 25 minutes and break for 5, four times over, then take 15 to 20 minutes. If 25 minutes is too short for the way you work, a 50-minute block with a 10-minute break is a common alternative, and some people prefer 90-minute blocks with a longer break. The evidence is for taking the breaks on a schedule rather than for one exact ratio, and it is one day of study with 87 students, so treat it as a reason to try the method rather than as a law.

Set the timer before you start, not when you notice you have drifted. Any timer will do; the schedule is the part people drop first.

3. Visual Learning with Mind Maps and Diagrams

Draw the structure, not the content. A diagram earns its place when the material has a shape: a sequence, a hierarchy, a cycle, a comparison or a causal chain. Redrawing a process from memory is self-testing in another form, and that is the part with evidence behind it. Copying a diagram out of a textbook is not.

Four shapes cover most modules. A timeline for anything with an order, including a historical period, a legal chronology or the stages of a clinical procedure. A tree for anything with categories inside categories, such as classifications in biology or the structure of a statute. A cycle for feedback loops, from the Krebs cycle to an economic multiplier. And a two-column comparison for anything an exam might ask you to contrast, which is most essay questions. Label the arrows: an unlabeled arrow between two boxes is a gap in your understanding you have hidden from yourself.

One caution, because the internet is full of the opposite advice. Pashler et al. (2008) were commissioned to review whether teaching matched to a student's preferred "learning style" improves results. They found that almost no study used a design capable of testing it, and that the few which did failed to support the idea. Diagrams are not a style you belong to. They are a tool that suits structured material, so use them where the material has structure and write prose where it does not.

4. Note-Taking Methods

Notes are worth the time only if you will retrieve from them. That is the test to apply to any system: does the layout give you somewhere to put a question, and can you cover the content and test yourself from what is left? Transcribing a lecture word for word fails both.

Three layouts cover most subjects, and the difference between them is what each one is designed to make easy.

• The Cornell method splits the page into a wide notes column, a narrow cue column on the left, and a summary strip at the foot. You take notes in the wide column during the lecture, then write questions in the cue column as soon after it as you can. The cue column is the point: cover the notes, read the cues, and answer from memory, which is practice testing built into the page.
• The outline method is indented headings and sub-points. It suits material that arrives in a fixed order, such as a lecture that works through a statute, a chronology or a procedure, and it is the fastest to write while someone is talking.
• The mapping method puts the topic at the center and branches outwards. It suits material where the connections matter more than the sequence, such as the causes of an event or the factors in an economic model, and it is the hardest to write live.

Pick one per module and keep it. Two habits matter more than the choice. Leave room beside your notes for the question you think of afterwards, because a question is something you can test yourself on later. And write the summary the same day as a check that you followed the lecture, not as your revision: the Dunlosky review rated summarizing low as a way to learn, so the learning still comes from answering the questions.

5. Teach What You Learn

The Feynman Technique asks you to explain a topic in the simplest terms you can manage, as though the listener were a child. The logic is simple: the moment you cannot say it plainly, you have found the part you do not understand. Adding your own examples makes it harder still, and therefore more useful.

The evidence for it is thinner than for technique 1. Adeoye (2023) is a systematic literature review of the technique; it presents case studies and testimonials from slower learners who reported better academic performance and more self-confidence, which is encouraging but is not a controlled comparison. The nearest technique in the Dunlosky review, self-explanation, was rated moderate. So pair the two: explaining a topic shows you the gap, and the self-test a day later shows whether you closed it.

In economics, for example, explain to a friend who has not taken the module why a price ceiling set below the market price leads to a shortage. If you find yourself saying "supply and demand" without saying what happens, at the capped price, to the quantity buyers want and the quantity sellers offer, that is the gap.

6. Study Environment and Time Management

A tidy desk does not learn anything for you. Two parts of your setup do pay, and both are about removing decisions rather than about comfort.

The first is the phone. Put it in another room rather than face down on the desk, so that checking it stops being a choice you make every few minutes. The second is a start cue: decide the night before where and when you will start and on what first task, one small enough to begin without thinking, such as answering yesterday's three questions. Plans in that if-then form ("at 9, at the library desk, I answer yesterday's questions") were the subject of a meta-analysis of 94 independent tests by Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006), which found a medium-to-large effect on whether people reached their goals, including on getting started.

Keep one place for study and another for everything else, so sitting down is itself the cue. Once the phone and the start cue are handled, the environment is finished, and the time is better spent on the review schedule above.

7. Seek Academic Help

Long stretches of study go stale, and the point at which you stop taking anything in is the point to ask rather than push. Ask early: your module leader, your personal tutor, your university's academic skills service, a study group, friends and family. Universities staff those services for this and they are quieter in week four than in week eleven. Also read our comparison of assignment help websites and what to check before you pay.

Most of these techniques have research behind them, and all of them work better applied to one module than spread thinly across five. Pick the review schedule above and one note-taking method, run them for a fortnight, and judge by what you can recall rather than by how long you studied.

How Do You Build a Weekly Revision Timetable?

Start from your contact hours, not from blank time. Put each lecture and seminar on the grid, then attach a 20-minute review slot to each one on the following day. Fill the remaining slots with the gap list from your last self-test. Leave one evening and one half-day empty.

1. Block the fixed hours first. Lectures, seminars, labs, shifts at work, travel. What is left is your real study budget, and it is usually smaller than students assume.
2. Attach a review to every lecture. One 20-minute slot the day after, one at day 3, one at day 7. Three short slots per lecture per fortnight.
3. Give assignments their own blocks. Coursework does not fit in a 25-minute Pomodoro. Book two-hour blocks for reading and drafting, and put them where your attention is best.
4. Schedule the hard subject when you are sharpest. Most people have two good hours a day. Spend them on the module you are weakest in, not on the one you enjoy.
5. Keep one evening and one half-day clear. Unplanned rest is what stops the timetable collapsing in week five. A plan with no slack is a plan you will abandon.
6. Review the plan weekly. Move what did not happen rather than pretending it did. If a slot fails three weeks running, the slot is wrong, not you.

For subject-specific writing guides, see our dissertation writing tips and guide to choosing a dissertation topic, or browse all study guides and academic writing samples.

If the problem is an essay rather than a study plan, our essay writing help runs from an essay plan you write up yourself to a finished model essay. Message us on WhatsApp with the brief and the deadline, and we will tell you what we can do.

Sources

• Adeoye, M. A. (2023). From struggle to success: the Feynman techniques' revolutionary impact on slow learners. Thinking Skills and Creativity Journal, 6(2), 125–133. https://doi.org/10.23887/tscj.v6i2.69681
• Biwer, F., Wiradhany, W., Oude Egbrink, M. G. A. and de Bruin, A. B. H. (2023). Understanding effort regulation: comparing 'Pomodoro' breaks and self-regulated breaks. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(Suppl. 2), 353–367. doi:10.1111/bjep.12593. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36859717/
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. and Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
• Gollwitzer, P. M. and Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1. Open-access copy: University of Konstanz repository
• Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D. and Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x
• Birmingham City University. Spaced repetition: best ways to revise. https://www.bcu.ac.uk/exams-and-revision/best-ways-to-revise/spaced-repetition
• Cornell University Learning Strategies Center. The Cornell note-taking system (handout adapted from W. Pauk, How to Study in College, 7th ed., 2001). https://lsc.cornell.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Cornell-NoteTaking-System.pdf
• E-Student. The mapping note-taking method. https://e-student.org/mapping-note-taking-method/
• Osmosis (2019). Active recall: the most effective, high-yield learning technique. https://www.osmosis.org/blog/active-recall-the-most-effective-high-yield-learning-technique
• Sheridan College Library. The outline method of note-taking. https://sheridancollege.libguides.com/takingnotesmodule/taking-notes-in-class/outline-method

Related guides: how to study for university exams, dissertation writing tips, and what to check before paying for assignment help.