For exam revision and learning new information, it is important to think about 'forgetting' and 'remembering wrongly'.
It is difficult to learn new material by re-reading it several times. There is no reason for the brain to memorise something which is presented to it without any effort.
After reading material, it is good to try to recall what you have read—without looking back at the original material! In this way, the brain really is doing some work.
Sometimes, you will have a probability when you remember things: you are not certain but you think that the textbook stated something. In those cases, do not convince yourself that your memory is correct; otherwise, you will memorise something untrue and find difficulty erasing that false information.
Managing Mental Fatigue
Memory becomes sleepy and distracted after a short time. When you feel this happening, it is good to do a lower mental stress activity—such as organising your existing knowledge rather than memorising new knowledge. If you have a rest, have a plan for testing your memory of the text in the way explained above.
The Power of Flash Cards
A tool for testing your memory is flash cards. You are presented with a revision question and then you try to remember the answer before looking at it. This works well because you are not looking at a page where the question and answer are presented together; that approach can trick you into thinking you have memorised something whereas you merely "know it when you see it."
People return to their successful flash cards days, weeks, or months later to discover what has been forgotten. It is a very well-established method. What I notice is that there is benefit to revisiting information on the same day as I first try to memorise it: to effectively tell my brain that the information matters. But visitng the information 5 times in a day is not as memorable as visiting it over many days briefly, in my opinion.
Often, information has a key and value. E.g. An English person doing a French exam might be thinking in English and so needs to convert his English word into a French word: the key is the English word and the value is the French word. Flash cards might be learned as "read French word side, turn the card, read English side"; but that is not handy for the person whose direction of recall needs to be the English first and then to arrive at the French. So it is important to think about which card side is the key and which card side is the value. Or maybe English-->French and French--> English both matter; so then the revision sessions need to deal with both situations.
Tip: Avoid making a big deck of items to learn. It is better to break it up into small sets and only use a big shuffled set once the smaller sets are mastered.
Building Familiarity
Flash cards are hard to work with if you are not familiar with the material. For example, a new foreign language word is not "anchored" in your memory yet. For this reason, it is helpful to use exercises that encourage you to visualise lesson material so that your memory does not treat it as passive information.
In 2026, I am trying to learn a dictionary word that each of several cartoon women mean. E.g. One of the women means the word "Enter". The cartoon faces are relatively new to me; so I think that maybe I should invent a game where the act of playing the game requires me to see the cartoon women faces. I don't need to be learning that one of them means "Enter" necessarily; I just want my mind to learn the faces; and then I can more easily visualise them in mnemonic scenes.
With the flash cards project that I am working on in 2026, the material is new. I use up a lot of effort in trying to think about the information. After studying the cards, I am trying to run through them again immediately after. It seems like nothing is sticking in my memory because the information, during the review, is still not long term memory and, I would argue, not really in short term memory; but I have a feeling that the review is going to help yo make the long term connections.
Another way to force recall is to pretend you are giving a tutorial to a student. You must shape a subject in your mind to be able to explain it clearly.