Students remember more when they quiz themselves on material than when they simply reread it, according to a 2007 practice guide from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The catch: most students never learn this on their own, and most classrooms don't teach study methods directly, so families often end up filling the gap.
That gap matters because the study habits students default to — rereading notes, highlighting a textbook, cramming the night before — are consistently the ones cognitive-science research rates as least effective, while the habits that work best are the ones almost nobody uses without being taught.
Why does rereading feel like studying but not actually work?
Rereading creates what psychologist Robert A. Bjork, a research professor at UCLA, calls a false sense of mastery. Writing in an Education Week opinion piece, Bjork explained that rereading is "accompanied by a sense of perceptual fluency, which students can then mistake for comprehension" — the material starts to look familiar, so it feels learned, even when a student couldn't reproduce it on a blank page.
Bjork's alternative is what researchers call retrieval practice: closing the notes and trying to recall the material from memory, then checking what was missed. "The act of what scientists call retrieval practice — forcing yourself to recall previously learned material — is far more effective," he wrote, adding that getting an answer wrong during self-testing isn't a failure. It's information: "You are identifying what needs to be studied."
What is retrieval practice, and how does a student actually use it?
Retrieval practice means testing yourself on material instead of looking it back over — flashcards without peeking, a blank sheet where a student writes everything they remember about a topic, or a friend quizzing from a study guide. It was one of two techniques rated highest for effectiveness in a widely cited 2013 review of learning strategies by cognitive scientists John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson of Kent State University, published with co-authors Elizabeth Marsh, Mitchell Nathan, and Daniel Willingham in Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
According to a summary published by Kent State University's Department of Psychological Sciences, the review rated five common study habits — including summarizing, highlighting and underlining, and rereading — as low-utility, despite those being "among the most commonly used by students." Practice testing and one other strategy, spacing out study sessions, were rated highest, with the researchers noting their effectiveness "has been repeatedly demonstrated for students of all ages." Dunlosky put it plainly: "By just replacing rereading with delayed retrieval practice, students would benefit."
Why does spacing out review matter more than cramming the night before?
The second high-value habit is spacing: reviewing material again after time has passed, rather than studying it once and moving on. The IES practice guide recommends teachers and students "arrange to review key elements of course content after a delay of several weeks to several months after initial presentation," a recommendation the guide backs with what it labels moderate evidence.
Cramming can still produce a passing grade on tomorrow's quiz, since short-term recognition doesn't require much spacing. What spacing changes is how much sticks for the unit test in a month, or the cumulative final in May. A single all-nighter and a review spread across several sessions can look identical on Friday's exam and very different on the exam that covers the whole semester.
What does the federal review say schools and families should do differently?
The IES guide, formally titled "Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning," lists seven research-backed recommendations for teaching content-heavy subjects like math, science, and social studies. Beyond spacing, it rates two other practices with strong evidence behind them: using re-exposure quizzes to reinforce material already taught, and prompting students to ask and answer "deep-level" questions about why and how something works, not just what the answer is.
The guide is explicit that these are classroom-level recommendations aimed at teachers, not a script for parents to run at the kitchen table. But the same underlying finding — that active recall and spaced review outperform passive rereading — is what a family can borrow, whether or not a particular teacher has built it into class time.
Does this work the same way across subjects and every grade level?
The IES guide's seven recommendations are aimed specifically at content-heavy subjects — math, science, and social studies — where students need to hold onto facts, formulas, and concepts over the length of a course, rather than at every kind of assignment a student might face.
Age is less of a limiting factor than subject matter. The Kent State summary of the Dunlosky review notes that practice testing and distributed practice earned their high ratings because their effectiveness "has been repeatedly demonstrated for students of all ages," from elementary school through college. That doesn't mean a first grader studies the same way a high schooler does — the format changes, from a parent quizzing a young reader on sight words to a teenager self-testing with flashcards before a chemistry final — but the underlying mechanism, recalling information rather than re-recognizing it, holds across that range.
How can a family build these habits without adding extra hours?
None of this research calls for longer study sessions — it calls for different ones. A few starting points drawn directly from the sources above:
- Trade one rereading pass for one self-test. Close the notes, write or say everything remembered about the topic, then check for gaps.
- Turn review into a short weekly habit instead of a single pre-test cram — a spaced ten minutes on Sunday can matter more than an hour the night before.
- Treat wrong answers on a practice quiz as the study plan, not a discouragement — they point to exactly what needs another pass.
- Ask "why" and "how" questions about material, not just "what" — explaining a concept out loud to a parent, sibling, or friend is a form of retrieval practice.
- Use a study partner for quizzing rather than shared rereading; a friend calling out flashcards forces recall in a way that reading together doesn't.
None of this guarantees a particular grade — a child's course load, teacher, and school context all shape outcomes, and the research describes tendencies across many students, not a promise for any one of them. What it does offer is a lower-effort trade: swapping a habit that feels productive for one the evidence says actually is.
For a related skills perspective, read How to Help a Student Study Smarter, Not Just Longer.
For more context, read How to Help a Student Study Smarter, Not Just Longer.