"There's some really <a href="http://mindsetonline.com/">interesting work by Carol Dweck </a>, at Stanford. She's shown that students tend to have one of two mindsets about learning. "One is a fixed learning model. It says, 'I have a certain amount of talent for this topic - say, chemistry or physics - and I'll do well until I hit that limit. Past that, it's too hard for me, and I'm not going to do well.' The other mindset is a growth mindset. It says that learning involves using effective strategies, putting aside time to do the work, and engaging in the process, all of which help you gradually increase your capacity for a topic.

Growth Mindset

"It turns out that the mindsets predict how well students end up doing. Students with growth mindsets tend to stick with it, tend to persevere in the face of difficulty, and tend to be successful in challenging classes. Students with the fixed mindset tend not to. "So for teachers, the lesson is that if you can talk to students and suggest that a growth mindset really is the more accurate model - and it is - then students tend to be more open to trying new strategies, and sticking with the course, and working in ways that are going to promote learning. Ability, intelligence, and learning have to do with how you approach it - working smarter, we like to say."

The way most students study makes no sense. That's the conclusion of Washington University in St. Louis psychologists Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel - who've spent a combined 80 years studying learning and memory, and recently distilled their findings with novelist Peter Brown in the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning .

Re-reading is inefficient. Here are 8 tips for studying smarter.

Divya Dhingra