Why Testing Yourself Beats Rereading: The Evidence for Retrieval Practice

Most students study by rereading and highlighting because it feels productive. The evidence says that feeling is misleading. Closing the notes and trying to pull the answer out of memory teaches you more than looking at the notes again.

Why rereading feels better than it works

When you reread a page, it looks familiar, and familiarity is easy to mistake for knowing. Dunlosky and colleagues reviewed ten popular study techniques and rated how useful each one is. Practice testing and spreading study out over time were rated high in utility. Rereading and highlighting, which students report using the most, were rated low.¹ The spacing half of that finding is covered in Why Spacing Beats Cramming. This article is about the testing half.

The classic experiment

In 2006, Roediger and Karpicke had students study short prose passages. Some then restudied the passage; others took a free-recall test with no feedback. A final test came five minutes, two days or one week later.²

After five minutes, restudying produced better recall. After two days and after a week, the students who had been tested remembered much more, even though restudying had left them feeling more confident. That gap between confidence and memory is the heart of the problem with rereading.

It is not only for memorising facts

A 2011 study in Science compared retrieval practice with a technique many teachers prefer, building a concept map while studying. Retrieval practice produced more learning, including on questions that required inferences, and even when the final test asked students to make a concept map.³ The authors concluded that the benefit comes from retrieval itself, not from extra elaboration.

How to use it

1. Close the notes and write. Put down everything you can remember about a topic on a blank page, then check what you missed.
2. Turn headings into questions. Answer them aloud, as if explaining to a friend, before you look.
3. Use flashcards honestly. They work only if you commit to an answer before you flip the card.
4. Space the tests. A short test today, another in two days and another next week beats one long session.
5. Use past questions. They are retrieval practice with the right shape.
6. Check afterwards. Note what you got wrong and restudy only that.

What to keep in mind

Retrieval practice needs something to retrieve, so read or listen first. Most of the studies are laboratory experiments with university students, and the results may differ for a particular subject or age group. It also feels harder than rereading, and the extra effort is part of what makes it work. If you feel the answer slipping, that is the practice doing its job.