I’ve coordinated A&P labs for a long time. Across thousands of students, the same pattern repeats: the students who get A’s are not the ones who study the most. They are the ones who study the right way. The difference between them and everyone else is not effort — it is method.
The good news is that the method is not a secret. The cognitive science of learning is one of the most-replicated areas in all of psychology. We know what works. We know what doesn’t. The bad news is that almost no one teaches you. You arrive in college with study habits you developed in high school, where the courses moved slowly enough that the wrong methods worked well enough to get B’s. A&P moves three to five times faster than a typical high school science class. The methods that got you through Biology in eleventh grade will not get you through this.
Here is what to do instead.
The five practices that actually work
Spaced retrieval
The single most replicated finding in the science of learning is that distributed practice dramatically outperforms massed practice. Three 30-minute study sessions across three days produce more durable learning than one 90-minute session, even though the total time is identical. (Cepeda et al., 2006, Psychological Bulletin; for the meta-analysis, over 800 effects across 250+ studies.)
What this means for you: if you have an exam in two weeks, do not study one big block the weekend before. Study six short blocks across the two weeks. Same total time. Different result.
Active retrieval (testing yourself)
Reading something is not learning it. Looking at a flashcard and thinking “yes I know that” is not learning it. The act that makes information stick is the act of pulling it out of your own head with no prompt. Roediger and Karpicke’s 2006 paper in Psychological Science showed that students who studied a passage once and then tested themselves on it remembered 50% more a week later than students who studied the passage four times.
What this means for you: close the book. Get a blank piece of paper. Try to draw the heart with all four chambers, valves, and great vessels labeled, from memory. The first time, you will fail. The second time, less. By the fifth time, you will not need the book.
Interleaving (mixing topics)
Most students study one unit at a time: cardiovascular all weekend, then nervous all next weekend, then digestive. The research says this feels productive but actually weakens transfer. Mixing topics during a single study session — some cardiovascular, then some nervous, then back to cardiovascular, then some digestive — produces worse performance during the study session but much better performance on exams and on later application. (Rohrer & Taylor, 2007, Instructional Science; the “desirable difficulty” literature broadly.)
What this means for you: after week 4 of the semester, start every study session with at least 10 minutes of old content before you touch new material. Yes, it will feel slower. The slower feeling is the work happening.
Elaboration (explain it in your own words)
The student who can explain how the conduction system of the heart works to a smart 12-year-old understands it better than the student who can recite the textbook paragraph. This is the self-explanation effect: forcing yourself to translate technical language into your own words requires you to find and fill the gaps in your understanding. (Chi et al., 1994, Cognitive Science.)
What this means for you: after every study session, write a one-paragraph summary in plain language — no jargon — of what you just learned. If you can’t, you don’t know it yet, and the paragraph you can’t write is exactly the thing the exam will ask about.
Sleep (the part most students sacrifice first)
Memory consolidation happens during sleep. This is not metaphor; it is the actual neurobiology. Walker’s Why We Sleep summarizes the literature accessibly; the original work by Stickgold, Diekelmann, and others is unambiguous. The all-nighter before an exam is the single worst thing you can do. You retain less than if you had studied less and slept more.
What this means for you: stop studying by 10pm the night before an exam. Get seven to eight hours. The hour you would have spent reviewing at 2am is worth less than nothing — it actively reduces what you’ll be able to recall.
Five things you might be doing that don’t work
These are the most common study habits I see among students who are working hard and getting C’s. Each one feels productive. Each one isn’t.
× Re-reading the textbook.
The most common study technique among college students. Also one of the least effective. Re-reading produces a feeling of familiarity (“I’ve seen this before”) that students mistake for understanding. Familiarity is not knowledge. The Dunlosky et al. 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest rated re-reading among the lowest-utility study techniques. Use retrieval instead.
× Highlighting.
Same problem as re-reading, plus an additional cost: the decision about what to highlight is shallow (“does this look important?”), and the act of highlighting itself does no cognitive work. The Dunlosky review rated highlighting one of the worst common study techniques. If you must mark up the book, write questions in the margins, not highlights.
× Recognition flashcards.
A flashcard with the structure name on the front and the answer on the back is fine if you actually recall the answer before flipping. But most students flip too fast and confuse recognition (“oh yes, that word”) with recall (“I can produce this from nothing”). Recognition is much weaker than recall and shows up on tests as the student who studied for hours and still drew a blank.
× Watching videos at 1.5×.
The illusion of efficiency. You can absorb spoken content faster than normal-speed delivery, but the comprehension drops, and what you do absorb decays faster than slower-paced watching with notes. There is a place for review videos at normal speed; there is no place for the watch-everything-on-2× study strategy.
× Studying with friends who don’t.
Not a moral judgment. Group study is excellent after you have studied alone enough to retrieve the content. Group study before you can retrieve becomes the strongest student in the group teaching the others, which mostly benefits the strongest student. Study alone first; then convene to test each other.
What a good study week actually looks like
Here’s a concrete example. A typical A&P week has three lectures and one lab session, covering one major unit. A working version of the science-of-learning approach for that week:
✓ Monday (lecture day):
During lecture: take notes by hand. After lecture, while walking back, try to recall three things from the lecture without looking at your notes. That night: spend 30 minutes turning lecture notes into questions (not summaries). Write each question on its own line. Don’t answer them yet.
✓ Tuesday:
Take Monday’s questions. Answer them on a blank piece of paper without the notes open. Then check. The questions you got wrong are now your “remediation list.” 15 minutes total.
✓ Wednesday (lecture day):
Same as Monday: hand notes during lecture, try to recall three things on the walk back, that night turn into questions. Plus: spend 10 minutes interleaving by re-asking yourself two questions from last week’s unit.
✓ Thursday:
Answer Wednesday’s questions cold. Add to your remediation list. Total: 15 minutes.
✓ Friday (lab day):
Pre-lab: read the lab manual once at normal speed before going to lab. During lab: don’t skip the notebook entries (see the lab notebook starter guide). After lab: 10 minutes labeling a blank diagram of the structures you saw, from memory.
✓ Weekend:
One 45-minute session: work through your full remediation list (the questions you missed on Tuesday, Thursday). Then one 30-minute session interleaving older units. Then stop. Take a walk. Sleep at a reasonable hour.
Total time: about 4–5 hours of focused study per unit per week. That’s less than most students put in — and it produces more durable learning.
What to do the night before an exam
The honest answer is: almost nothing. If you’ve been studying weekly all term, the night before the exam is for review, not learning. If you haven’t been studying weekly, the night before is too late.
A reasonable night-before protocol:
- One pass through your remediation list. Maximum 30 minutes.
- One blank-paper labeling exercise of the most complex diagram in the unit (heart, brain, kidney). Maximum 15 minutes.
- Stop. Get out of your room. Go for a walk.
- Sleep at your normal time. Do not sacrifice sleep for study time you should have done two weeks ago.
The one thing I wish every student knew
The students I have watched succeed are not the smartest ones. They are the ones who developed the discipline to study a little, often, over time, and who understood that the feeling of struggle during retrieval is the feeling of learning happening — not the feeling of failure.
Most A&P courses are taught at a pace that punishes cramming and rewards consistency. Your job, more than anything else, is to install a weekly rhythm in week one and hold it through the term. Thirty minutes a day beats eight hours on Saturday. Every time.
And one practical note: when you walk into my lab on Friday, you should know what we are going to do that day. Not because you read it; because you previewed it on Thursday night and asked yourself what questions the day will answer. The students who do this routinely leave my lab with the notebook entries already half done. The students who walk in cold spend the first thirty minutes catching up.
Companion resources on this site
- Weekly study-cycle template (printable) — a one-page calendar template that drops the schedule above onto your week.
- Pre-lab checklist (printable) — what to do the day before any A&P lab.
- Lab notebook starter guide — how to set up and run a real lab notebook from week one.
- A&P terminology survival guide — decoding the Greek and Latin you’re about to encounter.
- Practical assessment rubric system — the rubric your TA is grading you against. Knowing how you’ll be assessed changes how you study.
References worth reading if you want to go deeper
- Brown, Roediger & McDaniel (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Harvard University Press. The most accessible single book on this material.
- Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham (2013). “Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. The definitive review of which study techniques have evidence behind them.
- Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer (2006). “Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis.” Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. The meta-analysis on spacing.
- Roediger & Karpicke (2006). “Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention.” Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. The classic on retrieval practice.
- Walker, M. (2017). Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner. On sleep and memory consolidation.
This is supplementary material. None of it replaces the official material in your course. If anything I write here conflicts with what your instructor tells you about how to study for their course, follow your instructor. But the underlying cognitive science is the same in any course.