The Problem With How Most People Study

You spent years in graduate school. You read hundreds of articles. You sat through thousands of hours of lectures. Now you need to pass a 225-item exam covering the breadth of psychological science and practice. So you do what feels natural: you open your old textbooks and start rereading.

This is one of the least effective things you can do.

In a landmark review, Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) evaluated ten common study strategies based on decades of cognitive psychology research. Their findings were clear: the strategies most students rely on — rereading, highlighting, and summarizing — produce minimal learning gains. They feel productive because they create a sense of familiarity with the material. But familiarity is not knowledge, and recognition is not recall.

Why Passive Strategies Fail

Rereading and highlighting are passive strategies. They move information past your eyes without requiring your brain to do meaningful work. The result is what psychologists call the fluency illusion: because the material looks familiar when you see it again, you mistakenly believe you've learned it. Then you sit down on exam day, face a question that requires you to actively retrieve and apply that knowledge, and draw a blank.

The EPPP is particularly unforgiving of this illusion. It doesn't ask you to recognize information — it asks you to discriminate between plausible options, apply concepts to novel scenarios, and make judgment calls under time pressure. Passive familiarity isn't enough.

What the Research Says Actually Works

1. Retrieval Practice (The Testing Effect)

The single most powerful learning strategy identified in the research is retrieval practice — actively pulling information from memory rather than passively reviewing it. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) demonstrated that students who practiced retrieving material on tests retained significantly more than students who spent the same time restudying.

This is sometimes called the testing effect: being tested on material produces better long-term retention than re-reading it, even when the testing itself provides no feedback. The act of retrieval strengthens the memory trace in ways that passive exposure cannot.

For EPPP prep: Practice questions aren't just a way to assess your knowledge — they're the primary tool for building it. Every time you answer a practice question, you're engaging in retrieval practice. This is why question-based study is more effective than re-reading chapters.

2. Spaced Repetition

Hermann Ebbinghaus first documented the forgetting curve in the 1880s: without reinforcement, memory degrades exponentially over time. Cepeda and colleagues (2006) confirmed in a comprehensive meta-analysis that distributing study sessions over time produces substantially better retention than massing them together.

The optimal spacing depends on when you need to recall the information. For an exam several months away, spacing study sessions days or weeks apart is more effective than cramming the same material into consecutive days.

For EPPP prep: Start early. Study a topic, then return to it after a gap. The gap feels uncomfortable — you'll have forgotten some of what you studied, and that's exactly the point. The effort of re-learning during spaced sessions is what drives durable memory.

3. Interleaving

Most people study by topic: all of Biological Bases, then all of Assessment, then all of Ethics. This is called blocked practice, and it's less effective than interleaving — mixing different topics within a single study session.

Interleaving forces your brain to discriminate between concepts and select the right mental framework for each problem. On the EPPP, you won't get all the Biological Bases questions grouped together. They'll be mixed in with everything else. Training with interleaved practice prepares you for this reality.

4. Elaborative Interrogation

This strategy involves asking "why?" and "how?" about every concept you study. Why does this neurotransmitter produce this effect? How does this ethical principle apply in a dual-relationship scenario? Generating explanations forces deeper processing than simply reading a fact.

Dunlosky et al. (2013) rated elaborative interrogation as having moderate-to-high effectiveness, particularly for factual learning — exactly what the EPPP demands across its content domains.

5. Desirable Difficulty

Robert and Elizabeth Bjork introduced the concept of desirable difficulty: learning conditions that make initial encoding harder but result in stronger long-term retention. Spacing, interleaving, and retrieval practice are all desirable difficulties. They slow down initial learning and make you feel like you're struggling — but that struggle is the signal that deep learning is happening.

If your study sessions feel easy and comfortable, you're probably not learning much. Productive discomfort is the goal.

Metacognitive Monitoring: Knowing What You Don't Know

Perhaps the most underrated skill in exam preparation is metacognitive monitoring — the ability to accurately assess what you know and what you don't. Research consistently shows that students are poor self-assessors. They overestimate their knowledge of familiar-seeming material and underestimate gaps in areas they haven't tested themselves on.

For EPPP prep, this means: don't trust your gut feeling about readiness. Use practice exams diagnostically. Track which content areas and question types give you trouble. Direct your study time toward weaknesses, not strengths. Studying what you already know well feels good but doesn't move the needle.

Putting It All Together

An evidence-based EPPP study plan looks very different from what most candidates do intuitively:

  • Lead with practice questions, not textbook reading. Use questions to identify what you need to learn, then study targeted content to fill gaps.
  • Space your study over weeks and months, revisiting topics after intervals.
  • Mix topics within sessions rather than studying one domain at a time.
  • Test yourself constantly and use the results diagnostically.
  • Embrace the discomfort of effortful retrieval. It means the strategy is working.

References

Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.