How to Study With ADHD: Some Actually Helpful Advice & Explanation

I graduated from Whitman College with a bachelor's in biology, focusing on neuroscience. Along the scope of my coursework, I could have minored in psychology. I did get my master's from Johns Hopkins in science writing, and I just passed a certification quiz to tutor biology on Wyzant. So, I feel compelled to give my own two cents on how to study that worked for me.

First and most important: Start early and start small. A month before the exam, such as the night of the lesson, just give five minutes to reviewing. Five minutes. Or ten; whatever works for your attention span, before you're thinking of everything else you need to do that day, such as homework for your other classes.

Then you build up the study time incrementally. After a couple days, go to ten or fifteen minutes. After a couple more days, thirty minutes or forty-five. By the end of the second or third week, where the exam is only a week or a couple days away, this should mean you're studying for about an hour or so.

This studying should consist of answering practice exam questions, if you're too lazy to make up your own to answer. But don't feel the pressure of answering correctly at first; looking up why you got it wrong is part of the learning. Even if it's a practice exam, you can cheat by looking up which answer is correct and why. It's the 'why' that you're making sure you know in this part of the exam preparation.

When I was studying for the biology major field test at Whitman College (which I had to pass to get my BA on the subject), I had a month to prepare myself before it was test-taking time. It was winter break, and I had my sister coming to visit from several states away for about a week (it became two weeks due to covid; it was 2022). I wanted to spend more time with my sister than I wanted to study, but I also wanted to pass my exam with distinction for the honor.

So week one, I studied in small increments. I went through every practice mini-quiz, quiz, and exam the internet had to offer. I went through Khan Academy, Quizlet, and every other biology site that had questions and was (most importantly) free. But I went through it slow. One quiz at a time for one study session, which could be spent in the bathroom or before a nap or in the car. A segment of time in my day that I could spare five minutes. Fortunately, I'm an introvert; I had alone time to spare, after gifting my sister with my presence for the holiday. Overall, in one day, I had about five study sessions - five quizzes, and quite possibly five bathroom breaks. No family time was lost.

I am a very competitive person, and (at the time) with my brain drip-feeding me dopamine, it meant that I was competing with myself and with others to figure out biology concepts quickly and efficiently. When I was wrong, I looked up why. Sometimes I just needed a glance to see the flaw in my reasoning. Sometimes I needed to devote a couple more minutes to an entire concept, like cellular respiration and photosynthesis.

Mind you, that one I had to draw out and explain to my mother for the entire process to get stuck in my head. Not easy. Definitely was during the second week of my study month, after I kept getting questions wrong and knowing that I just didn't have that topic pinned in my memory.

When it came to the second week of studying, it was that longer process of explaining how biological processes happened. I had to draw out the systems in some cases, and in other cases I just vomit-typed my thoughts on how the process goes on a Word doc and looked up where I needed to correct or tighten my language according to Google. I have always been a fast typer and good with words, so this method worked particularly well with me. Explaining it to yourself orally might work better for you, or explaining it to someone else. Maybe making a presentation would help? But that takes awhile, and again this is assuming you have ADHD and focusing is not one of your strengths. The best way of understanding something is by teaching it to someone else, so if you're a quick talker you have a lot of oral presentations to give.

Every concept that I kept getting wrong through the mini-quizzes and the quizzes and the practice exams. Every thing I was not 100% certain of, I explained in detail what was going on. How does the heart pump blood? How does photosynthesis occur? What is the nitrogen cycle and the carbon cycle and how does bacteria go into them? What is fermentation?

I'm not telling you this won't take awhile. But for me, splitting this part up into chunks of thirty minutes, where I was having my alone time and knew where I could be confident after the first week of question-answering, this was effective in making sure I had my focus in the right directions. When you have a mental disorder that affects your attention and makes you sleepy wherever you falter in focusing (at least for me; individual experiences with ADHD guaranteed), you don't really have mental energy to waste. You have to know your knowledge limits and use the energy you have to dive through them.

The third week of reviewing was just more answering questions on practice tests, interpreting data and taking the time to explain to yourself why the answer you chose was correct on a quiz. It should also be where you tie concepts together, glueing cellular respiration and photosynthesis to plant physiology to cell biology to domain and kingdoms to fungi and carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen systems. It could take some time, but if you did the second week's work of explaining all the vague concepts to yourself in detail, it shouldn't be the longest work. This is also where you should present your knowledge verbally to friends and family, who can ask you questions that you should be able to answer. Studying becomes a discussion where dialogues of what-if can happen. And if you're a fast talker, this shouldn't take all day.

Second most important thing is to take a breather before the exam. Spend at most 24 hours doing whatever does not involve the exam's subjects. Watch movies, read books, hang out with friends; the day before the exam, you relax. I'm not sure what I did before my big test. I could have napped the rest of the day after I returned to my college dorm, or watched some of my favorite movies. Whatever I did to calm my nerves, to keep those thoughts of biology away from my active attention.

At the end of the month when I took that major field test administered by the Educational Testing Service organization, I got a very good score. I was in the top 4% nationally, meaning I performed extremely well compared to biology majors across participating institutions. My results were above average on every subject they were testing on: cellular and molecular biology, genetics, evolution, ecology, organismal biology, and scientific reasoning.

Yes, I am bragging because I'm proud of my achievement and the hard work I did to get it. Yes, it's on my resume. No, it so far has not helped me get a job as far as I can tell.

Mind you, my mother had been on my back the entire month telling me that the proper way to study - how she was raised to study in Russia - was by staying all day at the desk and wading through textbooks and exam prep. Not this sporadic way of studying; the off-and-on studying like a toxic relationship where I still had time to spend with my family and my eyes weren't glued to a page or screen.

But that method doesn't work for me. If you have ADHD, I suspect it wouldn't work for you too. And this way works with what neuroscience tells us.

Neuroscience tells us that information is taken in one part of the brain, converted for long-term use in another part of the brain, and then put in storage in another region of the brain. Along this process, information is repeated - recalled over and over again by our practicing with the information and working with it - to the point that connections between the individual neurons in the networks involved with the information are strengthened, so much so that the firing of one neuron creates a domino effect of firing off the rest.

These connections between neurons are on the molecular level, and I can go into a whole deep dive on that if requested (via LinkedIn or my website). But basically, by the repetition of information recall and working with the information on problem-solving tasks, the networks of neurons holding this information are strengthened, brewing efficiency and speed at the task of recalling the information to answer a question. This goes a long way in reducing our need to rely on last-minute cramming, losing sleep the night before the exam because you're going through every textbook and trying to memorize every last morsel of information while in a panic.

This means that working on the information every day for days and months glued to a desk with a stack of books next to you isn't the solution you think it is. When exams are all about recalling information and working with it, it is easy to think that you just need a day or two to cram things in. But when the exams include information from months of academic work and a good number of classes, it's good to know you have everything consolidated in your mind, ready for you to work on.

Sleep is especially important in this whole process, because it allows the brain to consolidate the memory; putting the information into long-term storage. That's partly why the mind needs to relax the day before the test. Cramming is one method that gets you the answers, but it doesn't get you the brain rest you need to feel both sure, awake, and ready to rapid-fire answers for the test.

I know part of what makes studying when you have ADHD difficult is the fact that you're not on the real dopamine trip until the week or a couple days before the test. You feel like you have time, you procrastinate, you take a nap, and then the day before the exam comes and you feel like your feet are on fire and you rush around like an ant with a task. But that's why I say study in small increments as early as you can.

Start small. Start with a miniquiz, a couple questions at a time. When you're in the bathroom, or before you fall asleep. And when you feel the panic rise in you at the topics that you're just not sure or familiar about, know that you have a month of working on that information and through those processes. You have time to work on where you're confused and struggling.

When I studied for the certification quiz for Wyzant, I had this information in my long-term storage. It was about two years since I'd graduated from Whitman, and though I had worked on my neuroscientific and biology knowledge for my master's degree, concepts like cellular respiration, photosynthesis, and cell cycles were vague for me. I remembered enough to get most answers right on Khan Academy or Quizlet, but not all of the answers. And if I could only take the certification quiz once on Wyzant, I was going to make sure I was ready for it.

So I studied using this method again. I unfortunately had time to spare and I'd gotten on ADHD medication, so focus and opportunity were on my side. I took several days to go through many different practice tests and search up where my reasoning was flawed. I quizzed myself, I connected concepts together again, and took more quizzes until I was making around 90% accuracy. Then I took a 24-hour break, napping and watching Supernatural. Then I took the quiz.

And to my happiness and satisfaction, I got 100% on it.

I hope this advice helps you. It's not the advice many parents would give or approve of, but it's the advice born from neuroscience and working with what kind of brain we are given. I didn't ask for ADHD, and I didn't like the typical 'just study!' advice from studying websites. My brain was meant for maximum efficiency with minimal energetic output. And this is the way to do it.

Citations:

Roediger, H. L. III, & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x

Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior; a neuropsychological theory. Wiley.

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