Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens

Show your work and write your answer out with a pencil. Don’t just look at the solution and say, “Sure, I knew that . . .”

Eat your frogs first. Start your most difficult work first. That way you can either finish it or take a break to let your diffuse mode help you.

Did you have to peek at the solution to get a little help? If so, that’s okay, but you’ll need to focus on what you missed or didn’t understand.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise,

That’s why we repeat something we want to remember temporarily. Like names. “Sara, Sara, Sara.” Or phone numbers. Or the list of chores your mom just told you to do. You’re helping your octopus to hold on. Maybe just until you can write it down. (In fact, writing things down is one way to help the octopus hold on!)

Deliberate practice with interleaving. Focus on the hard stuff and mix it up. That’s how you become an expert.

Learning in one area can give you more ideas in other areas. Subjects connect. Physics can help with biology. And it might even help with art, sports, or making friends!

Interleave. Don’t just keep practicing with slight changes in the same basic technique. Switch back and forth between different techniques. This will allow you to see when to use a technique. Books usually don’t help you interleave. You will have to practice skipping back and forth between the ideas in different chapters yourself.

Use the hard-start technique. If you’ve studied well for a test, start the test with a hard problem. Then pull yourself away when you find you are getting stuck and work on another, easier problem. You can go back to work on the harder problem again later in the test. You can often make more progress than if you tackled the hard problem at the end