Rereading feels productive and tests of your own memory feel hard. Here is what Roediger and Karpicke and others found when they compared the two.
By Bleart Emini, founder · Published · Last reviewed · 6 min read
Most students study by reading the material again and highlighting. It feels smooth, and the page looks more familiar each time. Active recall, also called retrieval practice, means closing the book and trying to produce the answer from memory. It feels harder and slower. The experiments below compare the two directly, and the results favor the harder one, with some important conditions.
Rereading. You go back through the chapter or your notes. Familiarity builds quickly, because you recognize each sentence as you meet it. Recognizing is not the same as being able to produce the answer when a question has no hints.
Active recall. You ask yourself a question and answer it without looking: write what you remember about a topic, answer a flashcard, work a practice problem, or take a practice test. Then you check, and note what you missed.
The two use the same material. The difference is whether your memory has to do the work.
Roediger and Karpicke (2006) had students read short prose passages. Students then either studied a passage again or took a free-recall test on it, writing down what they remembered with no feedback. Some took one test, others three. Final tests came after 5 minutes, 2 days or 1 week.
Five minutes later, restudying produced better recall than testing. After 2 days and after 1 week, the students who had been tested remembered substantially more than those who had restudied, even though the restudy group felt more confident in their memory.
Two things follow. First, if your test is in ten minutes, rereading can be enough; most exams are further away than that. Second, how sure you feel after rereading is a poor guide to what you will remember later.
Retrieval versus further study. Karpicke and Roediger (2008) had students learn foreign-language vocabulary. After a word had been answered correctly once, the researchers either kept testing it, kept studying it, or dropped it from further practice, in different conditions. Further study after a correct answer had no measurable effect on delayed recall, while further testing gave a large benefit. Students' predictions about their own performance did not match how they actually did.
Retrieval versus concept maps. Karpicke and Blunt (2011) compared retrieval practice with building concept maps from a text, a technique often recommended as a deeper way to study. Retrieval practice produced more learning, including on inference questions, and even when the final test asked students to make concept maps.
A review of ten techniques. Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham (2013) reviewed ten common study techniques. According to the summary from the Association for Psychological Science, practice testing and distributed practice received the highest utility ratings, while highlighting, underlining, summarization and rereading were rated low. The authors note that no technique suits every student.
In the 2006 experiment, the students who restudied rated their confidence higher than the students who had taken tests, and they remembered less after a delay. In the 2008 vocabulary study, students' predictions about their own performance did not match how they did. Both results point the same way: how fluent a page feels is not a reliable signal of what you will remember.
A plausible reading, offered here as interpretation rather than a finding of those studies, is that rereading makes the text easy to recognize, and recognizing feels like knowing. A test removes the page and shows you what you can actually produce. The unpleasant moment of not remembering is information, and it is the moment the memory gets practiced.
This is an example of the method, not a record of anyone's study. Suppose you read a section of a psychology chapter on classical conditioning. Rereading would mean going over the section again and highlighting the key terms. Active recall would look like this instead: close the book, write down the terms the section introduced and a one-line meaning for each, then open the book and mark which ones you got right, which you got wrong and which you forgot entirely.
The forgotten and wrong ones become your next study targets, and they go on a list or into flashcards to be answered again later. The ones you got right do not need another full read. Compared with rereading, you spent the same minutes and ended with a precise list of what to fix.
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