Close the Book

A study-skills workbook that teaches the few methods the research actually supports, then makes you practise each one on the page before you use it on your own subjects.

Most students revise by reading their notes again, highlighting and copying things out neatly. It feels like work and it feels like it is going in. Careful research over forty years says it mostly is not. This book explains why, in plain language, with the real studies and their numbers, and then teaches what works instead.

Who it is for

Students from about 14 upward: secondary school and high school, sixth form, college and university, in the UK, the US or anywhere else. Adults going back to study. Parents and teachers who want to show someone how. It assumes you know nothing about how memory works; every term is explained the first time it appears.

What is inside

• An experiment you run on yourself. Twenty words of Swahili, ten learned one way and ten the other. Two days later you test yourself and see which way won.
• Part 1: why studying feels like it works when it doesn't. Familiar is not the same as known; the ten common methods, marked high, moderate or low by a 2013 review; how fast forgetting happens; why the method that feels worse often works better; three ideas to drop (learning styles among them).
• Part 2: the four methods. Retrieval practice (close the book and bring it back), spacing (come back after 1, 3, 7 and 21 days, logged on one page), mixing (shuffle the kinds of problem so you practise choosing the method), and worked examples (read a line, say why, cover it, solve it). Each has the study behind it, how it will feel, the common mistakes, and a Do-it-now task with the material supplied: a biology passage to recall, three painters to tell apart, a mixed set of maths questions, a solution to explain line by line.
• Part 3: the methods in four kinds of subject, with a worked example of a real student's page in each: facts (biology, history, geography, law), problems (maths, physics, chemistry calculations), essays (English, history, philosophy) and languages. This is the part that answers "what does active recall even look like in maths?" and "past papers are for science, what do I do for an essay subject?"
• Part 4: a plan that survives a real week. A worked week for a student with five subjects, football twice and a Saturday job; how to build yours in fifteen minutes; what to do on the Monday after the week went wrong; the last week before an exam; the night before and the morning; a procedure for the exam hall and what to do when your mind goes blank.
• Nine tool pages to print and reuse: return log, blank page, question bank, the week, cards, evidence cards and essay plan, error log, past-paper tracker, last-week countdown.
• Answers to every Close-the-book box and task, and every study listed in full.

The book tests you on itself

Most chapters open with a Close-the-book box: two or three questions on chapters you read a few days ago, answered from memory before you check. It is the book using its own methods on you.

What you download

• Close the Book (68 pages, PDF, US Letter): the whole book, in colour, with bookmarks and a contents page.
• Print Pack (9 pages, PDF): the nine tool pages on their own, so you can print them again and again.

Good to know

• Written for both UK and US readers: a short table on page 4 translates revision, course outline, mark scheme, past paper and mock exam.
• Every study quoted is a published, peer-reviewed paper, listed with journal, year and page numbers on pages 67 and 68; the numbers in the book are the ones the papers report.
• The pages are US Letter size. On A4 paper, print with "fit to page". The tool pages are designed to be printed; the rest can be read on a screen or printed.
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.