What Actually Counts as Studying?
Author: Kimberly Tierney, Director of Academic Coaching
Read time: 3 minutes
This content was aided by an AI language model. Learn more at https://claude.com/.
Ask a student what "studying" means, and a lot of them picture one specific thing: sitting down the night before a test with a textbook and a highlighter. In reality, studying is a much bigger category than that, and knowing what counts can change how you spend your time.
Reviewing your notes is studying. Doing your homework is studying. Making flashcards, redoing practice problems, quizzing yourself, explaining a concept out loud to your roommate, these all count too. Studying isn't one specific activity. It's anything that actively engages you with material you're trying to learn.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Decades of research on learning and memory have found that how you study is one of the biggest factors in how well you actually learn, arguably as important as how much time you put in. That's genuinely good news. It means you have real control over your results. Two students can spend the same three hours "studying" and walk away with very different levels of preparation, depending on what they actually did with that time (You can read more about this in the book: Study Like a Champ).
A Way to Find Out What You Still Need to Study
One of my favorite techniques for exam prep uses a little bit of metacognition, thinking about your own thinking, to figure out where you actually stand.
Before you open your notes, a textbook, or a study guide, write down everything you think will be on the exam or that you need to know, entirely from memory. Then go back through your notes and add anything you missed.
Next, make three columns on a piece of paper:
Column 1: Everything you know well enough to teach it to someone else.
Column 2: Everything you're familiar with, but couldn't fully explain yet.
Column 3: Everything you still need more practice or learning on.
Be honest in Column 1. This is where students get themselves in trouble. It's really easy to mistake familiarity for mastery, to see a concept and think "yeah, I know that," when really you've just seen it before. That gap between what you actually know and what you think you know is called the curse of knowledge, and it leads to a dangerous combination: overconfidence and underpreparation. That's the worst possible place to be walking into an exam.
Keep coming back to this list as you study, moving items between columns as they shift from "familiar" to "known" or from "need more practice" to "familiar." It gives you a running, honest picture of where you actually stand instead of a vague feeling that you've "studied enough."
Studying isn't about the number of hours you log. It's about what you actually do with them.
