News & updates
Longer editorial pieces on learning and teaching, summaries of research we think learners should know about, notes on what has been revised in the collection, and announcements about workshops and reading circles. We publish roughly twice a month. Nothing here is sponsored.
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Interleaving: why mixing your practice feels worse and works better
Most learners study one topic to completion before moving to the next. Sessions feel smooth, performance during practice is high, and the sense of mastery is strong. Interleaving — deliberately mixing problem types within a session — reverses all three of those experiences and generally produces better performance on a later test.
The mechanism appears to be discrimination. When every problem in a set uses the same method, you never practise the hardest part of an examination question: working out which method applies. This piece looks at where the evidence is strongest (mathematics, categorization tasks, motor skills), where it is thin (extended writing, historical narrative), and how to introduce interleaving without making early learning harder than it needs to be.
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Handwritten or typed? What the note-taking research actually supports
The widely repeated finding that longhand notes beat laptop notes rests substantially on one influential 2014 study. Subsequent replication attempts have produced mixed results, and several found no difference once note content was controlled for.
Reading the literature together suggests the important variable is not the instrument but the behaviour it encourages. Typing makes verbatim transcription possible, and transcription is close to useless for learning. Handwriting makes it impossible, forcing summary. A learner who summarizes on a laptop and a learner who summarizes on paper appear to do about equally well. We have revised guide SKL 112 accordingly.
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Using generative tools without outsourcing your thinking
Learners tell us they are getting contradictory advice: that these tools are cheating, and that refusing to use them leaves you behind. Both claims flatten a question that deserves more care.
The useful distinction is not between using and not using, but between tasks where difficulty is incidental and tasks where difficulty is the mechanism. Formatting a bibliography is incidental difficulty. Working out what your argument is, is not — that struggle is where the learning happens, and a tool that removes it removes the learning too. We propose four questions to ask before pasting anything into anything, and note where institutional academic-integrity rules make the decision for you regardless.
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What makes a study group work, and what makes it a social club
Groups that improve results tend to share four structural features: a stated purpose for each meeting, individual preparation done before arriving, someone responsible for keeping time, and an activity in which members explain material to each other rather than reading in parallel.
Groups without those features are not worthless — company and accountability have their own value — but they should be recognized for what they are. All four features can be introduced in a single meeting, and this piece includes a short charter to work through together.
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Returning to study after ten years away
Adult learners arrive with capabilities that undergraduates often lack: they estimate time realistically, they are comfortable asking for clarification, and they know how to work when they do not feel like it. They also arrive with a specific anxiety, which is that everyone else finds this easier.
Written with our mature-learner advisory group, this piece covers rebuilding reading stamina, translating professional judgement into academic argument, and the explicit conversation about study time that is worth having with the people you live with before term begins rather than in week six.
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Does frequent low-stakes testing increase or reduce exam anxiety?
A reasonable worry about retrieval practice is that testing yourself constantly might raise anxiety in learners who already find assessment stressful. The available evidence points the other way for most learners: frequent low-stakes testing is associated with reduced anxiety at the high-stakes assessment, apparently because it makes the format familiar and reduces uncertainty about what one knows.
The finding is not universal, and studies rarely include learners with diagnosed anxiety disorders. We summarize what the literature supports, and are careful about what it does not. If assessment causes you significant distress, institutional counselling and disability services are better placed to help than any study guide.
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Twenty-two guides revised in the spring review cycle
Our annual review of the study skills and critical thinking shelves is complete. Twenty-two guides were revised, four were merged into two, and three were withdrawn because the practices they described are no longer ones we would recommend.
The most substantial changes are to SKL 121 (active recall), which now separates the evidence for retrieval practice from the weaker evidence for particular flashcard schedules, and CRT 518 (reading statistics), which gains a section on interpreting confidence intervals. Withdrawn guides remain accessible with a notice explaining why they were retired; we do not delete material silently.
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Autumn reading circles: registration opens in August
Four reading circles will run between September and December, each meeting online for one hour a week over four weeks. Groups are capped at twelve so that everyone speaks. This term’s texts cover the history of the examination, evidence and expertise, learning in the workplace, and one work of long-form journalism chosen by participants.
The reading list is published in advance so nobody commits blind, and there is no cost. Registration opens on 11 August through the enquiry desk. Places are allocated in the order requests arrive.
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What replication trouble in psychology means for study advice
A decade of replication work has substantially revised what the field claims to know. Some widely taught findings have not held up; others have survived repeated scrutiny and are stronger for it.
This piece explains how we decide what to publish: what makes a finding robust enough to recommend, why we distinguish between laboratory demonstrations and classroom trials, and why we have removed advice from this site that we published confidently in 2014. Being wrong in public is uncomfortable and unavoidable if you write about a moving field.
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All printable materials re-issued as tagged accessible PDFs
Every worksheet, template and reference sheet in the Practice Centre and Resource Hub has been rebuilt with a proper document structure: reading order, tagged headings, table headers, alternative text on diagrams, and text layers on everything previously supplied as an image.
Large-print and plain-text versions remain available on request at no cost, usually within five business days. Our thanks to the three volunteer testers who worked through the collection with screen readers and told us plainly what did not work. Details are in the accessibility statement.
How we publish
Everything above was written by the editorial team and reviewed by a second editor before publication. We do not accept sponsored posts, paid placements or guest articles from organizations selling educational products.
Corrections
Errors are corrected in place with a dated note at the foot of the article explaining what changed. Substantive changes are never made silently.
Research summaries
We name the studies we describe and say how strong the evidence is, including when it is weak. Single striking studies are treated as single striking studies.
Suggestions
If there is a topic you would like covered, or research you think we have misread, write to info@examit.club. Both are welcome.