Here's a quick test. Think about a concept from your hardest class right now. Something you studied recently and feel reasonably confident about.
Now explain it out loud, from scratch, as if you're teaching it to a 12-year-old who knows nothing about the subject.
Did you get through it smoothly? Or did you hit a wall about 30 seconds in where you thought, "Wait... how does that part actually work?"
If you hit the wall, congratulations. You just discovered a gap in your understanding that would have shown up on your exam instead. And the technique you just accidentally used has a name: the Feynman Technique.
Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was famous for being able to explain incredibly complex ideas in simple language. His insight was deceptively simple: if you can't explain something simply, you don't actually understand it. You've just memorized the vocabulary.
This distinction matters enormously in college. Most courses test application and understanding, not vocabulary recall. You might be able to recite the definition of "opportunity cost" perfectly, but can you explain why it matters when your friend is deciding between working a summer internship and traveling Europe? If not, you have the words without the comprehension — and that gap will show up on any exam worth its weight.
Cognitive science backs this up. A 2009 study in Memory & Cognition found that students who studied material with the expectation that they'd have to teach it performed significantly better on tests than students who studied the same material to take a test. The teach-group didn't just memorize more — they organized the information better, identified key principles, and built stronger connections between concepts.
The act of preparing to explain something restructures how your brain stores it.
The beauty of this method is its simplicity. You don't need special tools, study groups, or hours of preparation. Here's how it works.
Step 1: Choose a concept. Pick something specific from your course material. Not "Chapter 7" but "how supply and demand determine equilibrium price" or "the mechanism of action of beta-blockers."
Step 2: Explain it in plain language. Write or speak the explanation as if you're talking to someone with no background in the subject. No jargon. No technical terms unless you can define them on the spot. Use analogies, examples, and everyday language.
Step 3: Identify the gaps. This is where the magic happens. The moment you get stuck, handwave, or resort to repeating textbook phrases you don't fully grasp — that's your gap. Mark it. That's exactly what you need to study.
Step 4: Go back, fill the gap, simplify again. Return to your source material, study specifically the part you couldn't explain, and then try the explanation again. Repeat until you can walk through the entire concept smoothly in simple language.
Most students will find that 60-70% of what they thought they understood has gaps. That's not a failure — that's the entire point. You're finding these gaps now instead of on exam day.
Re-reading notes gives you a false sense of familiarity. You see a concept, and your brain says "I've seen this before" and files it under "known." But recognition is not the same as understanding. You recognize your neighbor's face, but could you draw it from memory? Probably not.
Teaching forces retrieval and construction. You're not recognizing information — you're building it from the ground up, in your own words, revealing exactly where your understanding is solid and where it's made of tissue paper.
This is why study groups can be so effective or so useless, depending on how you use them. A study group where one person explains concepts to the others is golden. A study group where everyone takes turns reading from the textbook is a waste of time wearing a social mask.
You don't need an audience to use the teaching technique. Here are three ways to do it alone, and none of them are weird.
First, the blank page method. After a lecture, close your notes and write everything you can remember about the main concepts on a blank piece of paper. Don't peek. When you get stuck, switch to a different color pen and fill in what you missed. The different colors show you exactly what you knew versus what you didn't.
Second, the voice memo method. Open your phone's voice recorder, pick a concept, and explain it out loud for 2-3 minutes. Play it back. You'll hear every hesitation, filler word, and circular explanation — each one marking a gap in your understanding.
Third, the chat method. This is where AI becomes genuinely useful for studying. Tools like Snitchnotes let you upload your course material and then quiz you on it with adaptive questions. The AI tutor feature acts as your "student" — you can explain concepts and it will ask follow-up questions that test whether your understanding holds up under pressure. It's like having a study partner available at 11 PM on a Tuesday who never gets tired of asking "but why?"
The teaching technique is most powerful in two specific moments.
First, immediately after learning something new. Within 24 hours of a lecture, try explaining the key concepts. This is when the gaps are freshest and easiest to fill. Wait a week and you won't remember enough to even know what you're missing.
Second, as a final check before an exam. Two days before your test, go through your study guide concept by concept and explain each one aloud. Any concept you can't explain clearly gets priority review time. This is infinitely more useful than re-reading your notes for the fourth time.
Most students think they understand the material because they can follow along when the professor explains it. Following along is not understanding. It's recognition with training wheels.
Real understanding means you can reconstruct the idea independently, explain why it matters, connect it to other concepts, and apply it to scenarios you haven't seen before. The teaching technique tests all of these simultaneously.
It's harder than re-reading. It's more uncomfortable than highlighting. And it's dramatically more effective than either.
The next time you sit down to study, skip the highlighter. Open a blank page, pick a concept, and start teaching. Your exam grade will thank you.
Try Snitchnotes for free at snitchnotes.com and turn your notes into an interactive study conversation.
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