How to study a textbook chapter for an exam

Common questions

• Nebel, C. (2021, March 4). SQ3R or read, recite, review. The Learning Scientists.A cognitive scientist’s review of the SQ3R method (survey, question, read, recite, review) finds very little research behind it as a whole, and suggests keeping its last three steps, of which reciting is retrieval practice.
• McDaniel, M. A., Howard, D. C., & Einstein, G. O. (2009). The read-recite-review study strategy: Effective and portable. Psychological Science, 20(4), 516–522.College students who read a passage, recited what they remembered with it out of sight, then reviewed it, recalled more of it straight away and a week later than students who reread it or took notes.
• Karpicke, J. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772–775.College students who spent their study time recalling a science text did better a week later, on questions about its facts and on questions that asked them to reason from it, than students who spent the same time drawing a concept map with the text open.
• Chi, M. T. H., de Leeuw, N., Chiu, M.-H., & LaVancher, C. (1994). Eliciting self-explanations improves understanding. Cognitive Science, 18(3), 439–477.Eighth graders who explained each sentence of a textbook unit on the circulatory system to themselves understood it better than classmates who read it twice, though they also spent longer on it; the study was small, 24 students.
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (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.A review of the research on ten study techniques rates practice testing and spaced practice as the most useful, asking why, explaining to yourself and mixing kinds of problems as moderately useful, and rereading, highlighting and summarising as of low use.
• Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.College students who recalled a short passage from memory remembered more of it a week later than students who reread it (56% of it against 42%), although rereading did better on a test five minutes later and left students more confident.
• Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.In 271 comparisons from 254 studies, items repeated with a gap between were recalled better than items repeated back to back in all but 12; most used word lists, and 229 were tested within ten minutes, only 31 a day or more later.
• Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., & Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095–1102.In an online study of 1,354 adults learning trivia facts, the best gap between two study sessions grew with the time until the test (of the gaps tried, one day for a test a week later, three weeks for a test ten weeks or a year later), and beat two sessions back to back by 10% for a test a week later and by 59 to 111% for tests five weeks to a year later.
• Karpicke, J. D., Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practise retrieval when they study on their own? Memory, 17(4), 471–479.Of 177 students at one US university, 84% said they reread their notes or textbook and 55% named rereading as their main strategy; 11% said they tested themselves by recall.