Hey @Watermelon_Stegosaurus
One of my courses in my Psych degree had a small module at the end that taught us about these "desirable difficulties" which aim to improve retention and recall rate of information. They go as follows:
1. Retrieval Practice
When creating notes and reviewing past content, it will always help to give yourself a mini test to see how well you can recall the information and identify which knowledge gaps you have. Making your own questions and creating your own answers to these questions will only help with consolidation. A tip I got from one of my peer mentor groups back when I started Uni, is that when you are writing notes based on lecture or tutorial content, make your topic headings questions, e.g "What brain regions are implicated in memory recall?", as opposed to "Brain regions in Memory Recall".
2. Spaced Practice
This is one that everyone always says, cramming is only good in the short term. The idea of spaced practice is that you want to space your study blocks apart, rather than a tedious long block of content. The goal is to distribute your practice into different time periods, to avoid being burnt out/bored and to ensure that you stay focused on the current task. A helpful tip, would be to combine 1 & 2, so go through, let's say, a 30 minute content revision, 10 minutes to make your questions. Then take a 10-15 minute break, and at the start of your next content revision block, try to answer the questions you made at the end of the previous revision block (that was a lot of words, but I hope that made sense).
3. Elaboration
This will help with deep encoding, and long-term/remote memory retrieval of information. What does elaboration look like? When reading material or reviewing content, try to avoid relying on highlighting content as this promotes shallow encoding, which is not as effective for long-term memory retrieval. An example of elaborating on content could be using the self-reference effect, whereby you relate the material you are reading to your own personal experiences. For example, say I was learning about the developmental period of babies/infants. I have a younger cousin, who when he visited my place, walked for the first time, and this was when he was around 1 year old. Through self-reference to this experience unique to me, it helps me to remember that babies usually tend to walk around the 1 year age mark (give or take a couple months). Another way to elaborate is to generate your own rules or stories based on the information. An example would be that in my Psychology Statistics course, we learnt about many different methods of data analysis, one being Bonferroni (weird name), and the other being Scheffe (also weird name). The Bonferroni was a "planned" analysis, and so you would define this before you do an experiment, while the Scheffe you run after you have the data. It helped me to distinguish between these two by thinking about the alphabet (which was my rule for this), as Bonferroni starts with a B, which comes before S, for Scheffe.
If that was too long to read, some very simple tricks that worked for me was a 30-on, 5-off method. Do 30 minutes of work, then take a 5 minute break, then rinse and repeat. These numbers are flexible (feel free to do a 25-10, or a 30-10), whichever suits you best. Also planning out the day, such as setting small goals to achieve within a time frame, i.e by 2:30p.m I want to have finished reviewing this subtopic.
I hope this helps, and good luck with your exams! You've got this 💪!
