The board exams are knocking on the door and these final weeks are a time of revision, anxiety and sleepless nights. Yet, sleep is essential to retain what you study. Here is a list of research-based study tips for last minute revision.

It's been scientifically proven that taking a 20-minute walk before an exam can boost your cognitive performance by up to 10 per cent. The latest study by Chuck Hillman of the University of Illinois, Cognition Following Acute Aerobic Exercise, found that moderate exercise - 30 minutes for adults and 20 minutes for children - results in a 5 per cent to 10 per cent improvement in cognition, the activity that takes place in the brain's frontal lobe. Using treadmills, brain monitors and other equipment, Hillman measured cognition before and after exercise.

Dr Alokananda Dutt, a neuropsychiatrist at AMRI Hospitals in Calcutta, reasons that regular exercise -cycling, walking or jogging - facilitates more bloodflow in the hippocampus region of the brain, responsible for encoding and storage of information that can be retrieved when required. "Moreover, aerobic exercise causes an adrenaline rush resulting in a sensation of pleasure; you are in a good mood and it's easier to concentrate, comprehend and remember."

Revise before bedtime

Have a topic that you are struggling to understand? Review the toughest material right before going to bed the night before the test. That makes it easier to recall the stuff later. Unfortunately, a majority of college students stay up all night studying, a practice actually linked to lower grades.

A collaborative study published by researchers from Notre Dame and Harvard found that research subjects tended to remember unrelated word pairs better if they had learned them shortly before a good night's sleep, rather than in the morning before 12 hours of being awake. This serves as more evidence that it's best not to pull an all-nighter. Get 7-8 hours of sleep and set a study session before bed.

"The brain is most active when you sleep. It reorganises all the information it has gathered throughout the day; stores or consolidates memory. Whatever you study just before you go to bed gets the top priority. If you study for long stretches without a wink of sleep, the information doesn't get encoded; an exhausted mind cannot recall fast," says Dutta. Also, don't wake up earlier than usual to study; this could interfere with the rapid-eye-movement sleep that aids memory.

Learn by chunking

 

People tend to remember things better when they learn related ideas in small chunks, rather than trying to cram all the details of a topic into their heads at once. Says Barbara Oakley, Co-Instructor of Learning How to Learn, the world's largest online course, on Quora (an online question-answer platform), "Chunking is the mother of all learning - or at least the fairy godmother. Chunking is what happens when you know something so well, like a song, or a scientific formula, or a verb conjugation, or a dance routine, that it is basically a snap to call it to mind and do it or use it."

Says Subhrangshu Aditya, faculty, Centre for Counselling Services & Studies in Self Development, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, "Break up the content into small, meaningful chunks. It's easier for the brain to store, it appears more manageable. Take a key sentence of each paragraph; organise in bullet points." He also advises to turn maths formuale and history dates into charts and fix them on the wall so that "you can glance over it several times". If you do this before you go to sleep, it gets consolidated in the memory easily.

A break on the hour

You may be tempted to go for marathon study sessions before exams, but research has shown that when people try to focus on a single task for a long time, their minds start to wander.

"Generally, studying in one-hour blocks is most effective (50 minutes of study with a 10-minute break). Shorter periods can be fine for studying notes and memorising materials, but longer periods are needed for problem-solving tasks and writing papers," suggests the website of the Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, to its students.

"After every hour of study I take a 10 minute break," says Arijit Dey, a second-year student of masters in computer science and engineering at Jadavpur University, Calcutta. "I feel that this helps increase the effectiveness of study." Agrees Aditya, "When the brain feels fatigued, it refuses to memorise things. So you need breaks. But don't take premature breaks and lose the track of study. Note down the points or to-do list before you take a break so that you can come back on track," he says.

Keywords for flashcards

Flashcards are one of the most commonly used study tools, tried and tested through ages. You can use paper index cards or a digital version (say Quizlet) to learn new material. Suggests Aditya, "Create cards with small bits of information; underline, box, colour to remember information and get them stored in your memory." Says Arijit, "I try to find out the key sentence of each paragraph."

To study efficiently you have to put in effort, there's no easy way out. These tips may work for some of you and may not work for others. Just do what works best for you, and good luck!