Effort matters. Persistence matters. Resilience matters. Where success (however you choose to define “success,” because it is a choice) is concerned, plenty of things matter.

Especially the ability to learn.

As no less an authority than Mark Cuban says about artificial intelligence, “If you don’t know how to use it, and you don’t understand it, and you don’t at least at have a basic understanding of the different approaches and how the algorithms work… you can be blindsided in ways you couldn’t even possibly imagine.” (That’s why Cuban feels the world’s first trillionaires will be people who master A.I.)

Want to get the greatest bang for your knowledge and skill expansion buck? Stop using most of the study techniques you were taught in school.

According to a massive study published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, re-reading, highlighting, and using mnemonics are relatively ineffective.

Here’s a breakdown of different learning techniques, roughly ranked from least to most effective:

• Rereading: restudying text material again after an initial reading
• Highlighting/underlining: marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading.
• Summarization: writing summaries (of various lengths) of to-be-learned texts.
• Keyword mnemonic: using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials.
• Self-explanation: explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem solving.
• Elaborative interrogation: generating an explanation for why an explicitly stated fact or concept is true.
• Interleaved practice: implementing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of problems, or a schedule of study that mixes different kinds of material, within a single study session.
• Distributed practice: implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time.
• Practice testing: self-testing, or taking practice tests on to-be-learned material.

The big three? Interleaved practice, distributed practice, and self-testing. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Which, as you’ll see, can be used in combination:

Interleaving

Instead of blocking (focusing on one subject, one task, or one skill during a learning session), interleaving involves learning or practicing several subjects or skills in succession.

And research shows interleaving is a much more effective way to train your brain (and your motor skills.)

I know what you’re thinking: If interleaving works better, why do we tend to practice one skill at a time? Partly because blocking is how students are typically taught in schools, and how employees are taught during training, if only because those sessions are easier for a school or company to schedule and administer.

Here’s an example: I’m (slowly) trying to learn to play guitar. Most of the instructional guides, online programs, etc. I found were based on blocking: one session might be scales, another chords, another arpeggios. In contrast, a program using an interleaving learning style would alternate practicing scales, chords, and arpeggios within the same session.

Or if you want to think of it another way, instead of going to the driving range and just hitting fairway woods, instead you would hit a few shots with a driver, then a few with a mid iron, then a few with a pitching wedge….

Why? One theory is that interleaving improves your brain’s ability to differentiate between concepts or skills. When you block practice one skill, you can drill down until muscle memory takes over and the skill becomes more or less automatic. When you interleave several skills, any one skill can’t become mindless — and that’s a good thing. Instead you’re constantly forced to adapt and adjust. You’re constantly forced to see, feel, and discriminate between different movements or different concepts.

And that helps you really learn what you’re trying to learn, because you it helps you understand at a deeper level.

Keep in mind interleaving isn’t just a better way to learn a motor skill. In a three-month study with 7th-graders, students who learned using interleaving scored 25 percent better than those who learned by blocking. Better yet, when tested on the same material thirty days later, the interleaving group scored 76 percent better than the block-taught group.

That means interleaving not only produces better short-term results, it also results in much greater long-term retention, which is incredibly important in the real world where the point of learning isn’t to simply remember something long enough to pass a test.

Distributed practice

Say you need to make a presentation. An investor pitch. A product demo. If you’re like most people, you wait till the last minute to learn what you need to know.

That approach is not only more stressful, it’s also a much less effective way to learn. The better approach? What psychologists call “distributed practice.”

Say you want to nail a presentation. Run through it once. Take a few minutes to make a few corrections or revisions.

Then walk away for at least a few hours, or even for a day, before you rehearse again. Do that, and research shows retention improves dramatically.

Why? Go over your presentation repeatedly and it’s still “top of mind.” You don’t have to retrieve it from memory.

Spacing out your sessions lets you tap into the power of study-phase retrieval: Each time you try to retrieve something from memory, that memory becomes harder to forget — even if you initially struggled to retrieve it.

Spacing out your sessions also increases contextual variability. When information gets encoded into memory, some of the context is also encoded. (That’s why listening to some songs can cause you to remember where you were, what you were feeling, etc., when you first heard that song.) That context creates useful cues for retrieving information.

And then there’s this: a study published in Psychological Science found that people who studied before bed, slept, and then did a quick review the next morning not only spent less time studying, they also increased their long-term retention by 50 percent. “Sleeping on it” not only helps your brain file away what you’ve learned, but it also makes that information easier to access.

In short, give yourself time to space out your learning or practice sessions and you’ll learn more effectively and efficiently.

Especially if you also weave in some…

Self-Testing

I know what you’re thinking. You don’t like tests, especially when tests are intended to assess: grades, rankings, hire/don’t hire decisions. Taking a test is usually high pressure, high stakes.

But what if a test is low-stakes? What if a test is used to help you? Turns out research shows that self-testing — which automatically makes it low-stakes testing, since you’re the only person who knows the results — is an extremely effective way to speed up the learning process.

Partly that’s because of the additional context you naturally create. Quiz yourself and answer incorrectly, and not only will you be more likely to remember the right answer after you look it up, you’ll also remember the fact you didn’t remember. Getting something wrong is a great way to remember it the next time, especially if you tend to be hard on yourself.

In a weird way, what you got wrong can be stickier in terms of memory than what you got right.

The key is to ensure the stakes are low. Say you’re teaching new sales reps how to conduct a product demo. Stop halfway and administer a pop quiz, and the stakes — since it feels like an assessment, not a learning tool — might not seem so low to the participants. Plus, no one likes to be wrong in front of other people.

But you could pass out a quick quiz, let people take it, go over the answers, and then let them throw away their papers when you’re done. Then it’s a low stakes test that fosters learning.

And provides a number of other positive outcomes. A study published in Psychology of Learning and Motivation uncovered a number of benefits of low-stakes testing:

• Testing (and retrieving) aids retention. Learning a presentation? Quiz yourself on what comes after your intro. Quiz yourself by listing the four main points you want to make. Quiz yourself on sales estimates, or key initiatives, or results from competitive analysis. That will force you to practice retrieving the information you want to remember, which will make it stickier.

Testing identifies knowledge gaps. Test yourself and you’ll quickly discover what you don’t know. Then you can focus on learning that. (And you’ll be more likely to remember that information since you didn’t know it the first time.)

• Testing helps you learn more the next time you study. Studies show that people who took a test before they studied retained information better than those who did not. (Think of it as priming your study pump.)
• Testing organizes knowledge. Reading is fairly passive. Testing forces you to make connections, or recognizes gaps in your ability to make connections. Testing helps you realize, “Ah — this goes with that,” or “This causes that,” or to in some way cluster information so that it makes better sense.
• Testing helps transfer knowledge to new situations. People who are repeatedly tested are better able to apply what they know to new situations. Think of it as the, “Hmm, this is a lot like that… but with one little twist” effect.
• Testing helps retrieve information not tested. Granted, this one seems odd. Still: take a test, and you’ll better remember information that was studied but not tested. (I’m guessing that’s the result of the overall memory boost frequent low stakes testing provides.)
• Testing prevents interference from prior material. Try to learn a lot at once and it all tends to run together. Or, more likely, you’ll remember what you learned early in the session, but after awhile the rest is just a blur. Toss in a few quizzes along the way, though, and that doesn’t tend to happen. If you need to learn a lot of material, break the session into chunks by inserting a few quizzes. (And if you’re teaching new employees a lot of material, definitely throw in a few low-stakes quizzes.)

​Best of all, testing tends to encourage more learning. While self-testing certainly reveals what you don’t know — at least not yet — it also helps you feel good about how much you have learned.

The result is a virtuous cycle. You feel good about improving, which motivates you to keep trying to improve, self-testing reveals you’ve continued to improve…

That’s another benefit of frequent, low-stakes testing.

Not only do you learn more. You also want to learn more.

Which means you will.