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Students who are good at studying history and biology often hit a wall in math, because the same methods stop working. Math is a skill, and you study it like one.
There is a specific frustration that math produces and other subjects mostly do not: you follow every step in class, you understand the worked examples, you reread your notes and it all makes sense, and then on the test you cannot do the problems. The material was never the issue. The issue is that understanding a solution and producing one are different skills, and most study methods only exercise the first.
Math is closer to a sport or an instrument than to a body of facts. You do not learn to play a piece by watching someone else play it, however carefully. You learn by playing it, badly at first, and then less badly. The methods below are built on that idea.
Reading a worked example is the equivalent of watching someone play. It is useful for the first exposure and nearly useless after that. Every hour of math study should be dominated by you solving problems with the solution covered. If you are reading more than you are writing, something has gone wrong.
When you get stuck, resist the urge to look at the solution immediately. Sit with the problem for a few minutes. Try something, even if it is wrong; wrong attempts teach you what the problem is not. Only then look, and when you do, read the solution just far enough to get unstuck, cover it again, and finish on your own.
This is the single most effective math study habit and almost nobody does it. Every time you get a problem wrong, on homework, on a quiz, or in practice, write it in a dedicated page or notebook with three things:
Review this log before every test. It is a list of exactly the mistakes you are most likely to make, written by the person most qualified to know. Two or three weeks in, you will start seeing the same errors repeat, and that pattern is the thing to practice.
The Flashcard Builder works well for this: problem on the front, the key step on the back. See the flashcard guide for how to write these.
When you miss a problem and then read the solution, you feel like you understand it now. You probably do, in the moment. But that understanding is fragile, and it will not be there on the test unless you produce the solution yourself. The fix is simple: mark the problem, and redo it from scratch a day or two later with the solution hidden. If you get it, cross it off. If you do not, it goes back in the rotation.
Textbook problem sets are usually blocked: twenty problems on the chain rule, then twenty on the product rule. This is good for learning a technique and bad for tests, because tests do not tell you which technique to use. Recognizing the problem type is often the hardest part, and blocked practice never exercises it.
The approach that works: first, as you learn each type, write a one-line description of how to recognize it ("a function inside another function: chain rule"). Second, once you know several types, practice them mixed: shuffle problems from different sections together so that each one requires you to decide what kind of problem it is before solving it. This feels harder and slower. It is, and it is also what the test will feel like.
A problem you can solve in ten minutes at home is not the same as a problem you can solve in three minutes on a test. Once you are getting problems right, start timing yourself. Pick a set of problems that resembles a test in length and mix, give yourself the test's time limit, and go. Afterward, note which types were slow. Speed comes from familiarity, and familiarity comes from repetition of that specific type.
Memorize them, but not first. A formula you have used in twenty problems is easy to remember and easy to apply. A formula you memorized from a list is easy to forget and easy to misapply. Learn the formula by using it; then, in the last few days before a test, put the ones you still hesitate on into flashcards. The math reference page has the standard sheets for algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus if you need to check one.
When your teacher provides a formula sheet on the test, practice with that exact sheet so you know where everything is and, more importantly, so you learn which formulas are not on it.
Notice what is missing: rereading the textbook, rewriting notes, and watching explanation videos. Those are all fine for a first exposure to a topic. After that, they are ways of feeling productive while avoiding the only thing that works, which is doing the problems.