How to Improve Study Habits: What the Research Ranks

To improve your study habits, replace rereading and highlighting with testing yourself and spread each topic over several days: a 2013 review of ten techniques rated only practice testing and distributed practice as high utility. Then make starting automatic with the same cue and first step each study day. The room matters less than most tips claim.

Most advice on study habits hands you a list: find a quiet desk, put your phone away, reward yourself, get some sleep. All reasonable, and none of it touches the two things students report doing most when they study, which are rereading and highlighting. A 2013 review of ten common study techniques rated both of them low utility. So improving your study habits is two separate jobs: switching to the techniques that work, and making yourself start them without a daily argument. This guide covers both, with the studies behind each step.

How do you improve your study habits?

Replace rereading and highlighting with testing yourself, spread each topic over several short sessions on different days, and tie the start of every session to the same cue. The first two changes decide how much you remember. The third decides whether you study at all on a tired Tuesday. None of the ten ranking pages we read cites research on how habits form.

Which study techniques actually work?

Practice testing and distributed practice are the two techniques with the strongest evidence. In 2013, John Dunlosky of Kent State University and four colleagues published a 55-page review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest that rated ten popular techniques. Their test was demanding: does the benefit hold across ages and abilities, across materials, across kinds of exams, and in real classrooms? Only two passed at the top level.

The moderate techniques are not bad. The authors write that their benefits generalise across some conditions but that the evidence was still limited, especially in real classrooms. The low group is mixed too: summarising helps some students on some tasks. The review’s own advice is the useful part: use practice testing instead of rereading, not on top of it.

In practice, testing yourself means anything that forces an answer out of memory before you look: a past paper, flashcards you answer before flipping, or writing everything you remember about a topic on a blank page and then checking your notes. Distributed practice means the same material comes back on several days. A review of 317 experiments on spacing, led by Nicholas Cepeda at UC San Diego in 2006, found that the best gap between sessions grows with how long you need to remember: an exam in three days and an exam in three months call for different schedules.

Why do rereading and highlighting feel like they work?

Because they make the material feel familiar, and familiarity is easy to mistake for knowing it. Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke at Washington University in St. Louis tested this in 2006. Students either restudied prose passages or took recall tests on them, without feedback. Five minutes later, the restudy group remembered more. Two days and one week later, the testing group remembered substantially more, even though restudying had made students more confident in their memory.

Students do not notice this on their own. When Karpicke, Andrew Butler and Roediger surveyed 177 college students in 2009, a majority said they repeatedly reread their notes or textbook, and relatively few reported testing themselves. The authors call it an illusion of competence. Nate Kornell and Robert Bjork at UCLA found the same trap with mixing topics in 2008: participants learned painting styles better when artists were interleaved, yet rated blocked study as more effective, even after their own test results showed the opposite.

Familiarity is easy to mistake for knowing it. Change the order, not the amount of time.

The practical fix is to change the order, not the amount of time. Open the chapter, close it, write or say what you remember, then reopen it to check. The gap you find is the part worth studying next.

Should you always study in the same place?

The room matters less than most tips claim. What matters more for a study habit is a stable cue for starting. Pages ranking for this topic disagree with each other here. One university page tells you to study in widely varying places, citing Godden and Baddeley’s famous diver experiment. Another page tells you to create a consistent study space. Both treat the question as settled. The research is more modest than either.

Read together, the first four rows say that a change of room can cost you a little recall, sometimes, and that the effect fades when you are concentrating on the material, which is exactly what testing yourself makes you do. The 1975 finding that study tips still cite did not hold up when Jaap Murre repeated it with 16 divers in 2021.

The last row is about a different question: not what you remember, but whether you keep doing it. Wendy Wood and colleagues found that students’ exercise, newspaper-reading and TV habits survived a move to a new university only when parts of the old context stayed the same. Habits run on cues. So if you study in several places, keep something else constant: the time, the first action, the playlist, the person you sit next to.

How do you make studying a habit?

Attach the start of each session to something that already happens every day, keep the first step tiny, and expect it to take weeks before it feels automatic. In the Lally study at University College London, simple daily behaviours took a median of 66 days to reach automaticity, with a range of 18 to 254 days between people. The details are in our article on how long it takes to build a habit.

1. Pick an anchor. “After I finish dinner, I open the question bank.” This is habit stacking, and the anchor should be something that happens on every study day, not most of them.
2. Make the first action a retrieval. Start with five questions from memory, not with rereading. It is the high-utility technique and the easiest one to begin, because it needs no setup.
3. Put the spacing in the calendar, not in your head. Each topic gets a first session and at least two return visits on later days. Deciding the return dates in advance removes the daily choice of what to review.
4. Measure the habit, not the hours. A session counts if it started and included a self-test. Counting hours rewards rereading, because rereading fills hours easily.
5. Plan for the missed day. A skipped session is not a reset. Resume at the next anchor, a point we cover in streaks versus consistency.

The broader method behind these steps, including how many new habits to start at once, is in how to build good habits.

How can you improve study habits for kids?

The same two techniques apply: short self-quizzes and material that comes back over several days, started at a fixed point in the afternoon. Dunlosky and colleagues rated practice testing and distributed practice highly partly because the benefits hold for learners of different ages and abilities. For a child, that translates into quizzing them instead of asking them to reread, and reviewing last week’s spelling list for two minutes before starting this week’s.

The habit side matters even more with children, because the parent usually provides the cue. A fixed slot, such as right after a snack, does the work that willpower cannot. Keep sessions short enough that stopping is the child’s idea, not a negotiation.

What the pages ranking for this leave out

Most recommend testing yourself. Almost none tell you to stop rereading, and none use the research on how habits form. On 26 September 2026 we read the full text of ten pages that rank for “how to improve study habits” and “good study habits”, from universities, a course platform and study blogs. Five more pages, including Kumon, the UNC Learning Center and the American Psychological Association, refused automated access and are excluded, so this is a sample, not a census.

The learning style advice is the clearest gap. Three pages tell you to match your study method to your learning style, and two of them list types such as visual, auditory and kinesthetic. In 2008, Harold Pashler and three colleagues reviewed the evidence for exactly that idea, which researchers call the meshing hypothesis, and found virtually no support for it. Several of the few properly designed studies flatly contradicted it. Your preference is real; matching your study method to it is not what improves results.

If you want to read further, the research uses different words from study blogs. Searching the terms on the right will get you to the papers. The last column is the number of PubMed records with the term in their title or abstract on 26 September 2026. PubMed covers biomedical and psychology journals, not all of education research, so read it as a signal of how much has been studied, not a full count.

How StellarHabit fits

StellarHabit tracks the habit side of this: whether the session happened. You can set up “study session with a self-test” as a habit and see it as a consistency percentage over weeks, so a missed evening lowers the number slightly instead of wiping a streak. It does not choose your study techniques or schedule your spaced reviews; a flashcard app does that part better.

What it adds is visibility. Your habits are shown to a small group of friends or classmates you choose, which turns a study group into a group that notices when someone stops showing up. Our guide to finding an accountability partner covers how to set that up. The limits are real: there is no money at stake, and if you prefer to study entirely on your own, a private tracker will fit you better.