What research says about studying

A 2013 review of ten study techniques rated highlighting and rereading as low utility. Only practice testing and spaced practice were rated high.

Students tend to study the way that feels productive: rereading notes, highlighting, copying summaries. The research of the last few decades suggests that what feels productive and what works are often different. This unit pulls the course together with three reviews and one well-known study that did not hold up as strongly as its headlines.

Ten techniques, rated

John Dunlosky, Katherine Rawson, Elizabeth Marsh, Mitchell Nathan and Daniel Willingham (2013) chose ten techniques that are easy to use, including some, like highlighting and rereading, that students rely on heavily. They judged each by how well its benefits held across learners, materials, tests and real classrooms. Two got high utility: practice testing and distributed practice, the subjects of the retrieval and spacing units in the memory course. Three got moderate utility: elaborative interrogation (asking yourself why a fact is true), self-explanation (explaining how a new fact relates to what you know) and interleaved practice (mixing different kinds of problems). Five got low utility: summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery for learning text and rereading. Low utility does not mean useless; it means the benefits were narrow or poorly supported.

Learning styles: a popular idea without support

Many people believe they are "visual" or "auditory" learners and should be taught in that mode. Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer and Robert Bjork reviewed this in 2008. They pointed out that to support the idea, a study must show that visual learners do better with visual teaching and auditory learners do better with auditory teaching, a crossover pattern. Very few studies even used a design able to test this, and several of those that did found results that flatly contradicted it. They concluded there was no adequate evidence base for using learning-style assessments in education. People do differ in abilities and preferences; matching teaching to a preferred style has not been shown to help.

Pen versus laptop

In 2014 Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer published "The pen is mightier than the keyboard". Students who took notes on laptops tended to copy lectures word for word and did worse on conceptual questions than students who wrote by hand. The paper was widely reported. Later replications were less clear. Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson (2019) repeated and extended it and did not find a reliable advantage for longhand, and a direct replication of the first study by Heather Urry and many co-authors (2021) did not support the idea that longhand note-taking improves learning. A reasonable reading: copying verbatim without thinking is the problem, whatever the tool.

A plan that follows the evidence, using this site: read a unit once, then do its questions before rereading; mark the cards you miss and let the boxes bring them back at growing gaps; use the hide-words exercises as quick self-tests; ask yourself why each answer is right; mix old and new units when you review; and sleep on it. Tie the daily review to a fixed time so it becomes a habit.