🧩 How to Improve Your Learning Process
New research adds another piece to the puzzle of which learning methods are most effective
If you’re currently trying to master a new language, study for an exam, or educate yourself on a new topic, you’ll know all about the challenges of learning and recall. New learnings often seem to leave your brain as quickly as they enter, and even with repeat study, some specific bits of information never seem to come to you when you need them.
Past research has uncovered several important principles that make learning more effective. For example, even centuries ago, philosophers and psychologists understood that the “testing effect” helps to solidify information in memory. When you’re learning new information, you should practice retrieval of that information, not just restudy of it. If you repeatedly expose yourself to a fact, you generally won’t recall it as effectively as if you test your ability to spontaneously retrieve it from memory too.
Another important learning principle is that you should space out your study periods rather than blocking them together into a single intense period of learning. This can help with consolidating new neural connections and allowing you to practice partially forgetting and retrieving new information over time.
A new study supports a third principle that goes hand in hand with these two concepts of retrieval and spacing. This article will highlight what that research shows.
📝 Why you need to vary context when you learn
In a study published in October 2024, researchers ran a series of experiments to test how varying context affects the efficacy of learning.
In their first experiment, they recruited 31 speakers with no experience of the Finnish language and asked them to learn 40 Finnish words. Across 5 practice phases, each of the words appeared within a contextual sentence in the participant’s native language. Based on that context, participants had to try and translate the Finnish word into their native language, and they received feedback after each attempt.
Some participants saw the same contextual sentence repeatedly across the 5 practice phases (e.g. “Dad is sweeping the lattia”) while others saw a different contextual sentence each time (e.g. “Dad is sweeping the lattia” followed by “A dog is lying on the lattia”).
After the 5 practice phases were completed, participants were given a simple test in which each of the Finnish words from the practice phase was presented on its own without the accompanying contextual sentences. Each time participants recalled the correct translation for a word, they earned a point in the test (for “lattia”, the correct answer would be “floor”).
Participants who practiced with varying contexts performed significantly better in the final test than participants who practiced with repeated contexts. Participants with varied practice correctly recalled ~60% of the test translations while participants in the repeated practice condition scored below 50% on average.
In a second experiment, the researchers also introduced a restudy condition. All participants in the previous study were learning via retrieval during their practice, since each of the practice phases presented the foreign word without its accompanying correct translation. Each time participants practiced, they had to retrieve the correct translation from their memory.
In contrast, some participants in this second experiment saw both the foreign word and its accompanying translation at the same time within their contextual sentences. Instead of retrieving the translation from their memory each time, they restudied the connection between the word and its translation in each practice phase.
As expected based on previous research, the results showed that retrieval practice significantly outperformed restudy practice overall, and varied contexts again outperformed repeated contexts. In other words, retrieval practice is more effective than restudy, but it’s most effective when you’re practicing retrieval across multiple learning contexts.
Similarly, when the researchers tested the effects of spacing, they found the same consistent benefits for varied contexts. When people practiced foreign words in blocks (i.e. repeatedly seeing the same word in consecutive practice sentences), they performed worse than when they practiced words spaced apart (i.e. alternating different words across consecutive practice sentences). But this spaced practice was optimally effective when it used varying contextual sentences each time instead of the same context.
This varied context benefit didn’t just apply to language learning. The researchers repeated their experiment using informational segments from geological science lectures instead of foreign language words. During learning practice, they asked participants either repeated questions or varied questions about concepts from that lecture. Participants who practiced across varied contexts performed significantly better in a concept recall test than participants who practiced across repeating contexts.
Bizarrely, participants were not good at knowing what type of practice was best for them. They believed that repeated context practice helped their learning ability more than varied context practice did. And they maintained this incorrect perception after both the practice phases of the experiments and the test phases. In other words, they were unable to notice the substantial advantages of learning with varying context.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
#1. Use varied context in learning
Whether you’re studying in an academic setting or just learning for yourself, try to avoid repetition and opt for varying the context in your learning material. When you target a particular concept in your learning, give your brain multiple different opportunities to associate it with existing knowledge in your memory. That way, you expand the number of cues you can use to unlock a particular piece of information when you need it. When one cue isn’t quite working, another cue might.
#2. Retrieval and spaced learning are still important
In addition to providing an interesting new angle about varying contexts in learning, the research above replicated established learning effects we’ve known about for a while. When learning new information, challenge yourself to recall the information while you study instead of simply rereading notes. Similarly, don’t study material in blocks—space it out and interleave it with learning different types of information.
#3. Embrace difficulty and don’t always trust your perceptions
People’s natural intuitions are that repeated contexts are better for learning than varied contexts, which is the exact opposite of what actually happens. This may be because learning across varied contexts feels more difficult during practice. However, that difficulty in practice translates into better learning performance and memory retention. When learning feels difficult, don’t shy away from it and don’t underestimate your level of progress. Sometimes, the tasks that feel most challenging are the tasks that are most rewarding.
“All things I thought I knew; but now confess
The more I know, I know, I know the less.”
~ John Owen