Robot Archie🇺🇦🇪🇺💙

Reading your notes four times loses to reading them once and closing the book. Not by a little, either. Washington University psychologists tested it in 2006, and a week later the four-time readers remembered 40% of the passage. The book-closers kept 61%. Roediger and Karpicke gave college students the same short passage. One group read it four times, and another read it once, then closed it and wrote down everything they could remember, three times in a row. The nasty part is that if you test them five minutes later, the rereaders actually win, 83% to 71%. And when everyone guessed right after studying how much they'd remember a week out, the rereaders rated themselves highest of anybody. They walked out feeling the most ready and ended up forgetting the most. What's going on is pretty simple. Rereading and highlighting make a page feel familiar, and familiar feels a lot like knowing, so your brain files "I've seen this before" as "I know this." The exam only checks whether you can pull it out with the book shut, and practicing that while you study is slow and feels like failing. That struggle is what makes it stick. A 2013 review graded the 10 most popular study techniques, and highlighting and rereading, the two things almost every student does, both came back rated "low utility." Quizzing yourself was one of the two rated highest. In one survey of college students, 1% called it their main strategy. Funny thing is, if those five friends are quizzing each other over pizza, that's the top-rated method sitting right there, and it beats six silent hours of rereading in the quiet section. Rereading only wins if your final starts five minutes after you close the book.