Back to school. Back to studying.

So, despite the deceptive weather here in Virginia, the march of the seasons goes forward and school begins anew. And rather than spending summer evenings relaxing in the warmth of the season, it's time to buckle down and get back to work - and studying.

I don't think too many people like studying, although certainly the rewards can be great. Studying is something you have to do - it's generally necessary for the genuine acquisition of complex knowledge. Given that - how can you make your studying more effective?

Well, it's apparently not teaching styles.

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

And, it's shocking to see that it's apparently not teaching style either. This scandalous finding is sure to be overturned. 

Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. “We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere..."

So what do we know about learning?  Well, when you look at what individual behaviors can be used to promote learning, there are some easy to institute behaviors that can help you retain the most bang for your studying buck.

For instance, one helpful technique is to change study location. Generally, advice about performance suggests that one should pick a quiet, uncluttered location and dedicate it to studying. Research, however, seems to indicate that switching locations aids retention, perhaps by encouraging your mind to make multiple associations to material for each of the locations in which you studied, rather than just one.

Switch it up too. Rather than spending all your study block on one subjects, break subjects into short blocks. And while everyone knows that cramming may help for short term memory, it seems to fade rapidly once the test is over. However, people may not realize how strong this effect is. It really matters. Theorists suggest that it may be because when you revisit information, you have to reorient yourself to where you were - kind of like reading a few pages of the book you half forgot over so that you remember where the plot was going. And that process reinforces the material.

“The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”

Last, practice tests and quizzes can be a powerful means of increasing retention. They show you where your information is lacking, and force you to review materials.

 Dr. Roediger uses the analogy of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, which holds that the act of measuring a property of a particle (position, for example) reduces the accuracy with which you can know another property (momentum, for example): “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.

So here's hoping for a productive term that makes maximal use of your study time.