Leading Article: Remembering facts: forget it

THE FIRST thing to remember about revising for exams or recalling important knowledge is not to make a list and try to remember it.

Research which we report on today found that if students tried to "cram" by learning a partial list of facts, they were much more likely to forget the other facts on which they were being tested.

On the other hand, those students who adopted the "osmosis" approach to learning, and tried to soak up the whole set of facts in a more relaxed way, did better.

The second thing is... where were we?