High-achieving students take charge of their own learning and ask for help when they’re stuck,

sought out extra study aids

asked instructors for help during office hours

self-regulated learning: the capacity to track how well you’re doing in your classes and hold yourself accountable for reaching goals.

Top students spend more time in retrieval practice, he says—quizzing themselves or each other, which forces them to recall facts and concepts just as they must do on tests. This leads to deeper learning, often in a shorter amount of time, a pattern researchers call the testing effect.

Students who formed study groups and quizzed each other weekly on material presented in class

Studying in general tends to be more productive when it’s done in short segments of 45 minutes or so rather than over several hours,

doing practice problems repeatedly until he no longer needed his notes to solve them—a highly effective strategy.