Study Techniques That Actually Work

In 2013, John Dunlosky, Katherine Rawson and three colleagues published a report that did something unusually blunt for academic psychology: they took ten of the most common study techniques - the ones students actually use and teachers actually recommend - and rated each one high, moderate, or low utility, based on how well it holds up across different kinds of material, students, and tests. The report ran to more than fifty pages and drew on decades of memory research, much of it published long before anyone thought to compare the techniques side by side in one place.

The Techniques That Work

Two techniques earned the high rating. The first is practice testing: quizzing yourself on material instead of just looking at it again, using flashcards, practice questions, or simply closing the book and writing down what you remember. The second is distributed practice: spreading study sessions out over days or weeks instead of massing them into one sitting. Both showed up again and again across different subjects, age groups, and types of test, which is a rarer and more valuable property in this literature than a single striking result.

Why Retrieval Works

The clearest demonstration of the first idea comes from a study Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke ran in 2006. Students read passages of prose, then either restudied them or took a recall test on them, and were tested again later. Restudying produced better performance on a test given five minutes afterward - it felt like the better method in the moment. But on tests given two days and a week later, the group that had tested themselves during study remembered substantially more than the group that had reread.

The effect is almost the opposite of what it feels like while it is happening. Rereading feels smooth and produces a comfortable sense of familiarity, which is easy to mistake for knowing the material. Testing yourself feels harder and exposes the gaps, which is exactly why it works: retrieving something strengthens the memory more than simply re-encountering it does. As Roediger and Karpicke put it, testing is not just a way of checking what you learned - it is itself a way of learning.

Why Spacing Works

The case for distributed practice rests on an even larger body of evidence. In 2006, Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues combined the results of many studies on distributed versus massed practice for verbal recall and found a consistent advantage for spacing sessions apart rather than cramming them together, across a wide range of materials and delays. Cramming can produce a passable result on a test the next day, which is part of why it survives as a habit, but the same hours spent spread across a week tend to leave more behind a month later.

Three other techniques landed in between: elaborative interrogation (asking yourself why a fact is true, rather than just that it is true), self-explanation (talking yourself through how a new idea connects to what you already know), and interleaved practice (mixing different types of problem in one sitting instead of drilling one kind at a time until it is mastered). Dunlosky's team judged these to show enough promise to recommend in the right situations, while noting that the evidence for them in real classrooms, as opposed to the laboratory, is thinner than the evidence for testing and spacing. Interleaving in particular has an odd signature: it tends to make practice feel harder and slower in the moment, which is often exactly when a technique is doing something useful rather than nothing at all.

The Techniques That Don't Help as Much

The techniques Dunlosky's team rated low utility are the ones most students actually reach for: highlighting, underlining, rereading, and summarizing. This is not because they do nothing - most students can point to a reason they feel useful - but because in controlled comparisons they add little beyond what simply reading the material once already provides, and they do not transfer reliably across different kinds of test. Highlighting in particular can quietly work against you: it draws attention to isolated sentences you might later recognize as familiar without actually being able to reconstruct or use them.

None of this means these techniques are forbidden. Summarizing can help you notice what you do not understand, which is worth something. But if study time is limited, the evidence points toward spending more of it retrieving and spacing, and less of it re-reading and coloring in text.

What This Means for You

The honest caveat is that most of this evidence comes from lab-based recall and recognition tests, which resemble some school exams far more than others, and from students who were told exactly what technique to use rather than choosing it themselves under real deadlines and real anxiety. Motivation, sleep, and how afraid a subject makes you feel all interact with how well any technique works in practice.

If a specific subject or exam consistently gives you trouble, the shift that tends to pay off is small and mechanical: turn today's rereading into tomorrow's self-quiz, and spread the same total hours over more days instead of fewer. Our study approach test can help map which habits you currently lean on, and if procrastination or exam anxiety is part of what makes distributed practice hard to actually schedule, the procrastination and math anxiety tests look at two of the more common reasons a good plan does not survive contact with a real week.