How to Learn Faster: 9 Techniques Ranked by Evidence

In 2013, a team led by John Dunlosky rated ten popular study techniques for the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Only two earned a high utility rating: practice testing and distributed practice. Highlighting and rereading, the two things almost everyone actually does, came in low.

That single finding should reorganize how you think about learning faster. Most advice treats a dozen techniques as roughly equal, pick whichever feels right. The research doesn't support that. A small number of techniques carry almost all the weight, and everything else is refinement on top of them.

This covers nine techniques, ranked by how much evidence actually backs each one, with the specific studies behind every claim.

Key Takeaways

• Only 2 of 10 popular study techniques, practice testing and distributed practice, earned a high utility rating in a major 2013 review (Dunlosky et al., Psychological Science in the Public Interest)

• Students tested repeatedly on material recalled 61% of it after one week, compared to 40% for students who only restudied the same material the same number of times (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006)

• A single night of sleep deprivation produces roughly a 40% reduction in the ability to form new memories the next day, not just tiredness, according to research published in Nature Neuroscience (Yoo et al., 2007)

• Nearly every technique on this list shares one property: it feels harder in the moment than the alternative, and that difficulty is the mechanism, not a side effect

Why Do the Best Techniques Feel Worse Than the Ones That Don't Work?

Because your brain uses fluency as a proxy for learning, and fluency is the wrong signal.

Rereading a page a second time feels smooth. The words are familiar, your eyes glide, and that ease registers as comprehension. Testing yourself on the same page feels effortful, sometimes frustrating, and often reveals you knew less than you thought. The uncomfortable version is the one that works.

Cognitive scientists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork named this pattern desirable difficulty: conditions that slow you down during practice often produce better long-term retention, while conditions that feel smooth produce fast forgetting. Nearly every technique that follows is a specific application of this one idea.

For the deeper mechanism behind why this works, see active recall: what it is and why it works.

The Two Techniques That Actually Matter Most

1. Active Recall: Test Yourself Instead of Rereading

Active recall means retrieving information from memory without looking at the source, rather than reviewing the source again.

Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke ran the study that settled this in 2006. Students read a passage, then either restudied it or tested themselves on it by writing down what they remembered. On a test one week later, students who had been tested repeatedly recalled 61% of the material. Students who had only restudied it recalled 40%, despite spending identical total time with the material. The detail that matters most: right after studying, the rereading group predicted they would remember more. They were wrong by a wide margin, because fluency during study is not a reliable signal of what will stick a week later.

The practical version: read a section once, close it, write or say everything you remember, then open the source and fix only the gaps. Closing the source is the step almost everyone skips.

2. Spaced Repetition: Review Before You Forget

Spaced repetition means spreading reviews across days instead of stacking them into one session.

The foundational large-scale review comes from Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues, published in Psychological Bulletin in 2006. Their meta-analysis of hundreds of experiments found a consistent pattern: spacing practice out over time produces better long-term retention than massing the same amount of practice into one sitting, and the ideal gap between reviews scales with how long you need to remember the material. Something you need to know in a week wants short gaps of a day or two. Something you need to know in a year wants gaps of weeks.

A practical schedule that works for most material: review one day after learning, again three days later, again in a week, then again in a month. Each successful recall right before you'd naturally forget strengthens the memory more than reviewing it while it's still fresh.

For the full research on why this specific timing matters, see the science of spaced repetition.

Seven More Techniques Worth Using, In Order of Evidence Strength

3. Interleaving. Mixing related topics or problem types together instead of practicing one kind for hours. Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor's 2007 study on math practice found that blocked practice looked better during the session itself, but mixed practice produced substantially better scores on a test given a week later. It works because mixed practice forces you to first identify which method applies, which is the actual skill you need when problems aren't pre-sorted for you.

4. Sleep after learning. Sleep is when the brain moves new material from fragile short-term storage into durable long-term storage. Research by Yoo and colleagues, published in Nature Neuroscience in 2007, found that people kept awake for one night showed roughly a 40% reduction in their ability to form new memories the next day, alongside reduced hippocampal activity during learning. This is a deficit in the capacity to encode, not just a feeling of tiredness. Studying difficult material in the hour before sleep, rather than earlier in the day, gives it priority during overnight consolidation.

5. The Feynman Technique. Explaining a concept in plain language, as if to someone with no background, and treating the points where you reach for jargon as a map of what you don't actually understand yet. A 2014 study at Washington University in St. Louis found that students who expected to teach material afterward recalled more of it than students who only expected to be tested, even though both groups studied the same material for the same amount of time. The expectation of teaching changes how you organize information while learning it.

6. Chunking. Grouping individual items into larger, meaningful units so working memory holds more with the same effective capacity. George Miller's classic 1956 estimate put working memory at around seven items; later research suggests the real number under strict conditions is smaller. The workaround is structure: twelve random digits are hard to hold, but the same twelve digits grouped into three meaningful years are easy. Before memorizing anything, look for the pattern first.

7. Desirable difficulty, deliberately applied. This is the umbrella principle behind techniques 1 through 6, but it's also a standalone practice: choosing practice questions harder than the real exam, working under mild time pressure, answering from memory before checking. If a study session feels comfortable the entire way through, that's a signal something easier is happening than real learning, not a sign things are going well.

8. The generation effect. Information you produce yourself is retained better than identical information you simply read. This has been demonstrated since Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf's 1978 experiments and has replicated across word lists, sentences, and full text comprehension since. The practical version: after learning something, close everything and produce a summary in your own words, a diagram, or three questions you'd put on a test. Writing your own quiz questions is the cheapest version, and it doubles as material for your next spaced review.

9. Dual coding. Learning the same idea through both words and a visual representation, rather than words alone. The effect is strongest when you generate the visual yourself rather than looking at someone else's diagram, drawing a concept produces meaningfully better recall than writing the same concept out, even when the drawing is rough. If visualizing genuinely doesn't work for you, some people report no capacity for mental imagery at all, drawing on paper still helps because the generation is what matters, not the mental image.

What Actually Kills Learning?

Highlighting and rereading. Both were rated low utility in the 2013 Dunlosky review. They're popular precisely because they're easy and because they produce a strong feeling of familiarity your brain mistakes for knowledge. Replace both with active recall.

Multitasking during study. The brain doesn't run two attention-demanding tasks in parallel, it switches rapidly between them, and every switch carries a measurable cost to comprehension. Put the phone in another room, not just face down on the desk.

Studying while sleep-deprived. Given the encoding deficit described above, an hour of study on insufficient sleep produces far less than an hour of study followed by a full night's rest. When you have to choose, protect the sleep.

Trying to match your "learning style." Widely believed, weakly supported. A 2008 review found almost no properly designed studies supporting the idea that matching instruction to a person's preferred learning style, visual, auditory, or otherwise, improves outcomes. Match the format to the material instead of the learner: a geographic relationship wants a map, a process wants a diagram, an argument wants prose.

Which of This Should You Actually Do Every Day?

The techniques are worthless if running them takes longer than the studying itself. Here's the compressed version.

In the morning or before starting new material, spend five minutes recalling whatever you covered last session, from memory, before looking at anything. Note only what you missed. While learning something new, read or watch it once, close it, explain it out loud in plain language, then write down what you remember before checking against the source, that single pass combines the Feynman technique, active recall, and the generation effect. Later in the day, review one older topic on a rotating schedule, a day, three days, a week, a month, so something older is always coming back around before it fades. Protect seven to nine hours of sleep, especially after a session on difficult material.

This is close to what Morso builds into the format directly rather than leaving to willpower. Every lesson explains concepts through analogy, connecting new material to something you already understand rather than presenting isolated facts, and roughly every three lessons in a course, a practice quiz gates your progress: it re-tests material from the lessons before it, weighted toward whatever you got wrong the first time, before letting you continue. That's the spacing and retrieval principle above, built into the structure rather than something you have to remember to do yourself. Try it free on any topic.

For a broader system on turning this into a sustainable daily habit, see how to study effectively.

The Bottom Line

Fast learners are not processing information faster. They're using a small set of techniques that feel worse in the moment and work better over time, and they've learned to stop trusting the feeling of fluency as a signal that learning is happening.

If you change one thing, stop rereading and start testing yourself before you check the answer. If you change two, spread your reviews across days instead of one sitting. Those two techniques were the only ones out of ten to earn a high utility rating in the major 2013 review, and between them they account for most of the available gain. Everything else on this list is real, but it's optimization on top of that foundation.

For a structured way to apply all of this on any topic starting today, Morso generates a course with retrieval-gated lessons in about 30 seconds, free to try.

Sources

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58.

Roediger, H. L. and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255.

Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks: A Review and Quantitative Synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354-380.

Rohrer, D. and Taylor, K. (2007). The Shuffling of Mathematics Problems Improves Learning. Instructional Science, 35(6), 481-498.

Nestojko, J. F., Bui, D. C., Kornell, N., and Bjork, E. L. (2014). Expecting to Teach Enhances Learning and Organization of Knowledge in Free Recall of Text Passages. Memory & Cognition, 42(7), 1038-1048.

Yoo, S. S., Hu, P. T., Gujar, N., Jolesz, F. A., and Walker, M. P. (2007). A Deficit in the Ability to Form New Human Memories Without Sleep. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 385-392.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81-97.

Slamecka, N. J. and Graf, P. (1978). The Generation Effect: Delineation of a Phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 592-604.

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.