Upgrade your study practices with tips from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and education, empowering you to balance your academic workload, personal life, and well-being. Updated 16/2/26 with a clarification of spaced practice. 

 

As a student, you already know how challenging it can be to balance your academic workload, your personal life, and your wellbeing.

Studying effectively isn’t just about cramming before exams. It’s about developing habits and strategies that help you learn better, remember more, and (ideally) enjoy the process a bit more along the way.

A while back, I started collecting evidence-based study and exam preparation strategies for university students. These ideas are drawn from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and education research (including work from groups like the Learning Scientists and Retrieval Practice), as well as the wisdom of counsellors and student support staff who have been helping students succeed for many years.

My goal is simple: To extract from the literature the strategies that have actually been shown to improve academic performance, and present them to you in a practical, usable format.

These are learning strategies that won’t just help you this semester — they’re skills that can benefit you across your lifetime.

 

What’s inside the document?

The current version covers topics such as:

• Evaluating how you currently learn and identifying areas for improvement
• Preparing yourself for success (what conditions help you be a good student?)
• Making the most of lectures and tutorials
• Getting information into your head (learning and memory strategies)
• Getting information out of your head (retrieval and exam techniques)
• How to approach exams
• Common writing traps and how to deal with them
• Strategies that don’t work (even though we still use them anyway)
• Embracing the social side of study
• Finding the fun in study
• Goal setting, time management, attention, motivation, and self-regulation
• Finding balance between study and the rest of your life
• What to do when things don’t go so well
• Further reading

It’s an ever-growing, living document. I revisit it semi-regularly, add new ideas, refine existing ones, and upgrade it as my understanding of effective learning strategies improves.

If you have suggestions, feedback, or a study/productivity strategy that’s worked well for you, I’d genuinely love to hear it.

The document is free to download and use. Click the image below to access it.

If you find it helpful:

• Consider sharing it with peers
• Check out our Exam Preparation Series
• Or connect with the crew at Student Learning Support Services if you’d like more hands-on support

Remember: studying isn’t just about getting good grades. It’s about building skills, habits, and ways of thinking that support your future career and life.

I hope you find something useful in it.

Take care,
Dr G