What is the most effective way to study for the HSC?
The most effective study technique in the research literature is also the least used in Australian homes. What it is, why it works, and how to run it at the kitchen table.
Watch an HSC student revise and you will usually see the same ritual: notes open, highlighter moving, a growing sense of familiarity that the student mistakes for knowledge. Rereading feels productive because recognition is easy. Sitting a paper in October, however, does not test recognition; it tests whether the student can produce the material from nothing, under time, in a room with no notes. The method that trains production rather than recognition is retrieval practice, and it is one of the two most robustly supported findings in the science of learning, alongside spacing.
Retrieval practice means closing the book and forcing the recall. A student who has just studied a topic writes out what they remember, then checks it against the source, then repeats the exercise a few days later. It feels harder than rereading, and it is, because the difficulty is the mechanism: each successful retrieval strengthens the memory more than another passive exposure could, and each failed retrieval reveals precisely what has not been learned. A student who rereads discovers the gap in the examination. A student who retrieves discovers it on Tuesday.
Roediger and Karpicke ( 2006 ), Psychological Science, Experiment 2. Tested five minutes after studying, the order reverses: rereading scored 83 per cent and repeated retrieval 71 per cent. The students who felt best prepared were the ones who remembered least a week later, which is why the method is so often abandoned.
The effect compounds with spacing. Retrieving a topic once is useful; retrieving it again after a gap of days, when it has started to fade, is far more so. The forgetting is not a failure of the method but the point of it: a memory recalled from the edge of forgetting is stored more durably than one recalled while still fresh. This is why cramming produces students who know the material on Sunday night and have lost half of it by the following Friday, and why ten minutes a day across a fortnight outperforms a single long session the night before.
- 1Close the bookNothing on the desk but a blank page and a pen. Notes are for checking, not for reading.
- 2ProduceWrite everything remembered about the topic: definitions, steps, examples, the diagram, the formula. Five to ten minutes.
- 3CheckOpen the source and mark the page: what was right, what was missing, what was wrong.
- 4Log the gapsThe missing and wrong items go in a list. They are the study plan for tomorrow.
- 5Space itRepeat the same topic three days later, then a week later. Each retrieval gets easier, and the memory stops fading.
Parents often ask how to help without becoming a tutor, and retrieval practice is the answer, because it needs no expertise in the subject. The parent's job is to hold the book and ask the question: tell me the steps of this process, draw me the diagram, explain this to me as if I knew nothing. The student does the work. What the parent notices, quickly, is where the answers are fluent and where they stall, and the stalls are the study plan. Fifteen minutes of this at the kitchen table on three evenings is worth more than an hour of highlighting on each of those evenings.
A caution about how it feels. Retrieval is uncomfortable for a student who has been rereading, because rereading produced a warm sense of competence and retrieval produces a cold list of gaps. Students abandon the method in the first fortnight for exactly this reason, so the first fortnight needs to be protected. At MA99 every session opens with retrieval of the previous week, before anything new is taught, and students who resist it in week one are usually asking for it by week six, once they have watched their own timed results move.
Your child says they have revised photosynthesis for an hour and it feels solid. What is the useful next question?
The method extends beyond memorised content. In mathematics, retrieval means attempting the problem type before reviewing the worked example, not after. In English, it means rebuilding last week's thesis from memory before the essay is opened. In the sciences, it means drawing the mechanism unprompted and then checking it. In every case the principle is identical: produce first, check second, log the gap, return to it after a pause. Students who run this loop for a term need much less telling about what to study, because the log answers the question for them.
Two objections come up. The first is that retrieval takes longer than rereading, which is true per session and false per term: a student who retrieves spends less total time because the study is targeted at what is not yet known. The second is that some material must simply be read, which is also true; the reading is the first exposure, and retrieval is what turns the exposure into something that can be produced in October. Reading is where learning starts. It is not where it should stop.
Edward MaDirector, MA99 Education
