As finals approach, a new book by two Washington University professors has advice for students: put down the textbook and pick up the flash cards.

Henry “Roddy” Roediger III and Mark McDaniel, Washington University professors of psychology, had together conducted several years of research into the best ways to learn. But when they found their conclusions were not reaching a wide audience, they decided to publish a book with recommendations for the general population.

Roediger and McDaniel, along with writer and novelist Peter Brown, authored the book “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.” Using examples from Washington University, academia and sports, the book argues against many traditional study techniques.

McDaniel said that although re-reading assigned materials may help students feel that they have learned and understood the material, they remember the most information when they review old material that they may have already begun to forget.

“Good, permanent learning that allows transfer and allows flexible use of knowledge often is a consequence of some difficulty in learning…The term that’s been used is desirable difficulty,” McDaniel said. “In some cases, if you engineer the situation so the learner has to struggle a little bit, then in the end, learning is going to be better than it will be if you make learning as easy as possible.”

Another of the book’s main points is that people learn best when they are tested on concepts in an arbitrary order, rather than in discrete units like those used in many undergraduate courses. McDaniel offered the example of a baseball player learning to hit different kinds of pitches: a player who practiced hitting several fastballs in a row, then several curveballs in a row and so on would not perform as well in a game as a player who practiced hitting pitches out of order.

According to Roediger, a handful of Washington University professors in the International and Area Studies and psychology departments—including himself and McDaniel—have implemented some of the book’s recommendations by giving students short-answer quizzes at the end of class to force them to recall the information they learned and have observed an improvement in quality of class discussions and student retention of information.

For University students preparing for finals, Roediger recommended trying to retrieve information in new ways rather than simply reviewing it.

“My advice is always test yourself; try to think up questions you think the professor is going to ask and prepare yourself for those,” Roediger said. “Quizzing yourself, working in study groups where you ask each other questions—that’s a good way, too.”