Stress, especially high stress testing like the LSAT, law school exams, and the bar exam, impairs our memory and decreases our performance. Some law students with text anxiety “blank out” during exams due to acute stress and cannot remember anything they learned. What if you could make your memory and all of the material that you learned immune to stress?
Learning by using retrieval practice and self-testing makes your memory more “stress resistant” than if you learn by rereading or memorization. Retrieval practice – recalling information from memory without any cues and taking practice tests – is a learning super tool, much more effective than restudying or rereading. Researchers have already proven that retrieval practice is better for learning than rereading because it builds knowledge and calibrates learning by helping learners understand what they do and do not know.
Now, researchers have now proven that retrieval practice also protects what we have learned against acute stress.
“[U]sing a highly effective learning strategy to strengthen memory at encoding inoculated memory against the deleterious effects of the delayed stress response.”