After studying, close the book and test yourself instead of rereading

Cost

Free, and total time does not increase. Spend the time you would have used rereading on writing out the points from memory or doing practice questions with the book closed. The hard part is that self-testing exposes what you haven't remembered right away, which feels worse than rereading.

What you get

A meta-analysis of 222 independent studies and 48478 students: classroom quizzes raised students' academic performance, with a medium effect size (g = 0.499). How large the effect is depends on several conditions: which study method the control group used, whether the quiz format matched the final exam, whether the material matched, whether corrective feedback was given, how many times the quiz was repeated, where and when it was given, how long the intervention lasted, and what experimental design was used. Another review that evaluated ten common study methods one by one rated “practice testing” and “distributed practice” in the top tier (high utility), on the grounds that they work for learners of different ages and abilities and have been shown across many kinds of tests and real educational settings.

Notes

Self-testing is meant to force you to pull things out of your head, not to give you a score. How to do it: after finishing a section, close the book and write the main points from memory first, then flip back to check. It works better with corrective feedback, so after checking your answers, look closely at where you went wrong. The size of the benefit is marked large, judged from the effect size and the rating. These two pieces of evidence measured grades, not hours, so the time-saved cutoff was not applied. Self-testing and §23.15 (spread the same time over several days) are the two top-rated methods in the same review; use them together.

Evidence grade

A : Specific numbers from meta-analyses, large cohorts or randomized trials; for law and policy, the statute or official text.

Sources

1. Yang C, Luo L, Vadillo MA, Yu R, Shanks DR (2021). Testing (quizzing) boosts classroom learning: A systematic and meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 147(4), 399–435. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000309
2. Dunlosky J, Rawson KA, Marsh EJ, Nathan MJ, Willingham DT (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

Translated from the Chinese original. Original book, section 23, tip 14. Content may be out of date and rules differ by place. When you actually deal with an agency, a doctor or a court, follow what local officials, doctors and lawyers tell you. Disclaimer