One of the quiet pleasures of life is to find your perfect study environment. Who doesn’t want a space with just the right levels of comfort, light, and ambient sound–ideally close to tasty snacks and fun distractors for breaks. Kudos to all the learners out there who have created or located those places in which their learning powers reach their pinnacle.
Now go study somewhere else!
Retention of knowledge depends on many factors, such as how you accessed information the first time and how often you undertake retrieval practice. Some elements of independent study, however, seem marginal even though they may exert massive influence on the ability to apply learning in the moment:
- How you study
- Where you study
- When you study
- With whom you study
Committing to the same study routine can produce the appearance of large gains in knowledge but lead to struggles with retrieval when you need it. We don’t want our ability to access our highest levels of knowledge or understanding to be bound to a particular context, so we need to vary our study conditions often enough to break those connections.
The concept of state-dependent memory is not a new one. You may have heard the rumor that people who study while drunk should test while drunk. This finding emerged from an actual 1969 study; take the lesson as evidence of state-dependent memory, not as a suggestion to study under the influence!
I see anecdotal examples of the way context influences academic performance all the time in our students. Many of the teens I work with to prepare for the SAT or ACT commit to all the right steps to taking exceptional practice tests with one fatal flaw: they always test in the same place. Of course they do; often, only one room in a house or apartment will be quiet and isolated enough for proper testing conditions. But a contextual connection between location and performance develops over time that may lead to worse results on test day.
I always recommend to students that they vary practice testing location, especially right before a big test. Look at your own study habits and consider which aspects you might change on a regular basis to avoid state-dependent memory problems. The more we vary practice–even how, when, or where we practice–the better.
(That said, consider these tips from Campuswell on how to optimize your study space.)
Mike Bergin