During my years coordinating A&P labs at Boise State, I saw how much study habits mattered. Effort is important, but hours alone do not explain a student's progress. A useful method helps you find gaps, practice difficult tasks, and check whether you are improving.
Learning research offers practical guidance, especially on spacing practice and testing yourself. College A&P may require more vocabulary and independent study than your previous courses. You do not need to abandon every familiar habit. Add ways to check what you can explain or identify without the answer in front of you.
Here is what to do instead.
Five practices to build into your week
Spaced retrieval
Research consistently supports distributed practice: returning to material over time. Three 30-minute study sessions across three days can support 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. Check what you remember at the start of each session.
Active retrieval (testing yourself)
Reading helps you encounter and understand new material. But looking at a flashcard and thinking “yes I know that” does not show that you can recall it. Practice answering before you look at the answer, then check and correct your response. 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. Compare your drawing with a reliable reference, correct the gaps, and try again in a later session.
Interleaving (mixing topics)
Once you have practiced a topic, mix in related material. Interleaving asks you to decide which knowledge or method fits each question, rather than repeat one response. It can feel harder at first while supporting later use. The benefit depends on the task and your preparation. (Rohrer & Taylor, 2007, Instructional Science; part of the research on “desirable difficulty.”)
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. Check your answers; difficulty alone is not evidence that a method is helping.
Elaboration (explain it in your own words)
Explaining how the heart's conduction system works in your own words can reveal gaps that reciting a paragraph misses. Research on the self-explanation effect examines how explaining relationships helps learners make sense of material. (Chi et al., 1994, Cognitive Science.)
What this means for you: after every study session, write a one-paragraph summary in plain language about what you just learned. Use technical terms where needed and explain them. If part of the explanation is unclear, check your notes or bring a specific question to your instructor.
Sleep
Sleep supports memory consolidation. Walker’s Why We Sleep summarizes the literature accessibly, alongside research by Stickgold, Diekelmann, and others. Avoid relying on an all-nighter. Fatigue can make it harder to concentrate and recall what you have studied.
What this means for you: set a stopping time for review and protect your usual sleep schedule. Spread the preparation across earlier days so the final evening does not carry the whole workload.
Five habits to use more deliberately
These habits can be useful, but they are not reliable checks of what you can do on your own. Pair them with recall, explanation, or practice.
× Re-reading the textbook.
Re-reading can clarify a difficult passage, but it can also produce familiarity (“I’ve seen this before”) that is easy to mistake for understanding. The Dunlosky et al. 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest rated re-reading among the lower-utility study techniques. After reading, close the text and explain the idea or answer a question.
× Highlighting.
Highlighting can help you locate material later, but marking a sentence is not the same as explaining it. The Dunlosky review found limited support for highlighting as a study technique on its own. Turn key passages into questions you can answer without the text.
× 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. Flipping too soon can confuse recognition (“oh yes, that word”) with recall (“I can produce this from nothing”). Say or write your answer first, then check it. Keep difficult cards in the next review.
× Watching without checking understanding.
Choose a pace that lets you follow the explanation. Pause after a section, summarize it without replaying, and try a related question. Slow down or review when you cannot explain the material; playback speed alone is not a measure of learning.
× Group study without active participation.
Prepare questions before the group meets, then take turns answering and explaining. Everyone should practice, not just listen to one person. Check disagreements against course materials and bring unresolved questions to the TA.
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 become your review list for the week. 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 without notes. Add missed questions to your review 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 review 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 is a planning estimate, not a limit. Adjust the time to your course load, prior preparation, and progress.
What to do the night before an exam
Aim for focused review rather than a full restart. If preparation has been uneven, use the remaining time to identify priority topics and practice a few representative questions. You can still make useful progress without trying to cover the entire course overnight.
A reasonable night-before protocol:
- One pass through your review 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. Plan the remaining review so you can stop without losing sleep.
The one thing I wish every student knew
Difficulty recalling an answer is useful information, not a judgment about your ability. Check what is missing, practice it, and return to it later. Ask for help when repeated practice is not resolving the confusion.
A regular weekly rhythm gives you several chances to revisit material before an exam. Start with a schedule you can sustain and adjust it when your workload changes. Consistency is more useful than an ambitious plan you cannot keep.
Before lab, read the procedure and write down its purpose, key terms, and any questions you have. This preparation lets you spend more of the session observing, practicing, and discussing the work rather than first discovering the instructions.
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, examples of assessment criteria. Check your course’s own rubric when planning your 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.