Why it's good to take breaks - what kinds of breaks we should be promoting/facilitating

2. Space out your study sessions over time.

It’s been known since classic 19th century educational psychology studies that people learn better when using multiple, short training episodes rather than one extended session. Two years ago, the Lynch and Gall labs found out why. They discovered a biological mechanism that contributes to the enhancing effect of spaced training: brain synapses encode memories in the hippocampus much better when activated briefly at one-hour intervals.

“This explains why prolonged ‘cramming’ is inefficient — only one set of synapses is being engaged,” said Lynch, professor of psychiatry, human behaviour and anatomy, and neurobiology. “Repeated short training sessions, spaced in time, engage multiple sets of synapses. It’s as if your brain is working at full power.”

3. Change up your study environment.

“The brain wants variation,” says Carey. “It wants to move, it wants to take periodic breaks. You don’t have to have the same chair, the same cubicle, the same room, to do your memorisation.”

5. Quiz yourself instead of re-reading.

“Repeated studying after learning had no effect on delayed recall, but repeated testing produced a large positive effect,”

6. Check in with yourself periodically.

You may think you have a good idea of what you have learned and what you have left to learn in a course or during a test prep session, but the more explicit about it you are, the better. Rather than assuming you’ve been absorbing everything you read, make a list of everything you actually remember. Then go back and see what concepts you’ve missed.

8. Look forward to forgetting.

Making mistakes while learning can benefit memory and lead to the correct answer, but only if the guesses are close-but-no-cigar ... near-miss guesses act as stepping stones for retrieval of the correct information — and this benefit is seen in younger and older adults.

Bjork agrees, adding that forgetting can actually be good for the brain. In fact, it can serve as a powerful spam filter. Under a principle she calls “desirable difficulty,” when the brain has to work hard to retrieve a half-forgotten memory, it re-doubles the strength of that memory.

If you sit down to study a load of material, “of course you’re not going to remember most of it the next day,” Carey adds. You do have to go back and build your knowledge. “But it’s not that you don’t remember well, or you’re not a good learner. It’s that forgetting is a critical part of learning.

http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/how-does-the-brain-learn-best-10-smart-studying-strategies/

http://www.youramazingbrain.org/brainchanges/stressbrain.htm