The right strategies can help you study smarter. A study by Scientific American named "distributed practice" as one of the most effective study methods available to students. Spacing out study time into smaller sessions means your brain has more time to absorb the information. The report from the publication cited an analysis of 254 studies involving more than 14,000 people and found that students were able to recall more information after spread-out study sessions rather than studying in a single, long block of time.As an article for the Social Psychology Network noted, if you only have 6 hours you can realistically devote to studying, it's better to study in three 2-hour blocks of time over several days or weeks than have a single 6-hour session.  Get into the habit of reviewing your notes after classIn addition to spreading out your study sessions, make it a habit to review notes from class every day. This helps you better retain information because of a phenomenon called "the Curve of Forgetting." As California State University, Bakersfield explained, when you finish listening to a lecture, in that moment your brain knows 100 percent of the information. However, your level of recall quickly declines if you do not review the information again within a short period of time. If you don't refresh your memory of the material, you will lose 50 to 80 percent of what you learned. However, research shows that if you review the information for just 10 minutes within 24 hours from when you initially learned it, you can raise your recall level back to 100 percent. Then, a week later, it will take just 5 minutes to refresh your memory, with the minutes required to jumpstart your memory diminishing over time. To take advantage of this mental process, CSUB recommends that students spend half an hour every weekday and 1 1/2 to 2 hours every weekend reviewing what they have learned. Take practice tests Taking practice tests has several benefits: You can gain a better understanding of what material you'll need to know as well as familiarize yourself with the structure of the exam. There are practice tests available for the Graduate Record Exam, the Graduate Management Admissions Test and other standardized exams, as well as for professional certification exams, such as those for accounting and nursing. Teach yourself, and other peopleAlong with distributed practice, Scientific American named self-testing as one of the two most effective study methods for students. Quizzing yourself on your knowledge of the material helps improve memorization and make connections between different sets of information, so if no practice test is available for an exam, make your own! "Quizzing yourself on your knowledge of the material helps improve memorization."