“Studying” vs. “Actually Studying”

After the aforementioned second rash of first-exam failures, scores on the second exam were significantly improved.  This fact alone does not confirm the wait-and-see approach but I can confirm that at least one student has taken this approach to my class.  When asked what she did after the first exam to improve her performance on the second exam she stated, “I actually studied this time around.”  Of course, when I asked after the first exam how long she had spent studying she reported a study time of three hours, so there is either a difference between “studying” and “actually studying” or my methods of data collection are returning invalid results.  I suspect the latter.