What the review found
Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham reviewed ten commonly used learning techniques in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (2013) and rated each high, moderate or low utility. According to the abstract, practice testing and distributed practice received high utility ratings; elaborative interrogation, self-explanation and interleaved practice received moderate ratings; and summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning and rereading received low ratings.
The authors note that students often rely on rereading and highlighting, but that these do not reliably boost performance, and they recommend reallocating time to more effective techniques such as practice testing. The Association for Psychological Science summary adds that the high-utility techniques helped learners of many ages and abilities across many tasks.
| Rating in the review | Techniques |
|---|---|
| High | Practice testing; distributed practice |
| Moderate | Elaborative interrogation; self-explanation; interleaved practice |
| Low | Summarization; highlighting; keyword mnemonic; imagery for text; rereading |
A swap list for online courses
The swaps cost little extra time because they replace, rather than add to, the existing habit. They also produce evidence: a wrong answer tells you what to review next, which rereading never does.
| Habit | Swap it for | How long it takes |
|---|---|---|
| Rewatching a lecture video | Write three questions from memory, answer them, then check the video | About the same time |
| Highlighting the transcript | Close the transcript and write the main steps of the procedure | A few minutes |
| Rereading notes the night before a quiz | Answer last week's questions again before looking at notes | Shorter than a full reread |
| Summarizing every section | Explain why one step works in your own words, then verify | Short, targeted |
When a low-rated technique is still fine
A low utility rating means a technique did not reliably improve learning across the evidence the authors reviewed. It does not mean it is harmful. A quick skim to orient yourself before a lesson, or highlighting to find a passage again, is reasonable. The problem is when these feel like studying and replace retrieval. If you leave a session without having attempted anything from memory, you have no measure of what stuck.
The review was written mostly with students in mind, but the techniques it rates are the ones adult learners use with online courses too: rewatching videos, highlighting transcripts and rereading notes. If a course offers built-in quizzes, use them as practice tests before looking at the answers, and treat a wrong answer as the most useful thing the session produced.
A 30-minute study session for a video course
This is an illustrative structure, not a protocol from the review. It keeps a skim or a highlight available as a tool, but every session ends with something attempted from memory and something scheduled for later.
| Minutes | Activity | Technique |
|---|---|---|
| 0-5 | Without notes, answer three questions from the previous lesson | Practice testing |
| 5-20 | Watch the new lesson once; pause to predict the next step | First exposure |
| 20-27 | Close the video and write the key steps and one why-explanation | Practice testing and elaboration |
| 27-30 | Check against the lesson and schedule two questions for a later day | Distributed practice |
Where to go next
Our retrieval-practice guide turns notes into questions with an answer key, the spaced-practice guide schedules the review, and the interleaving guide covers mixing problem types, one of the moderate-utility techniques. The review covers studies across many settings; individual courses and learners differ, and these sites summarize published research rather than our own trials. Sources were accessed 13 October 2026.
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