Most students study by rereading their notes and highlighting their textbook. A major review of the research rated both of those as low utility — meaning they don't consistently improve performance. The two techniques that do work reliably are the two almost nobody uses: testing yourself, and spreading study out over time instead of concentrating it before the exam.
That's the whole article in three sentences, and it's worth knowing that the gap isn't about effort. A student can put in four hours of genuinely hard work and get very little from it, because the method is doing the limiting rather than the hours.
The reference point is a 2013 review published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest by John Dunlosky and colleagues, which examined ten common study techniques and rated each for how well its benefits held up across different students, materials and test types.
Rated low utility
Highlighting and underlining
Rereading
Summarization
The keyword mnemonic
Imagery use for text learning
Rated high utility
Practice testing — quizzing yourself on the material
Distributed practice — spreading study out over time
The authors were direct about the mismatch: most students report rereading and highlighting, yet these techniques don't consistently boost performance, and other techniques should be used in their place — practice testing instead of rereading.
The effectiveness of the two high-utility techniques has been demonstrated repeatedly across many kinds of test and for students of all ages. This isn't a contested finding.
Because they produce a sensation of fluency that's easy to mistake for learning.
Reading a page for the third time feels smooth. The material is familiar, nothing surprises you, and that ease registers as knowing it. But recognizing something when it's in front of you is a different skill from retrieving it when it isn't — and an exam only ever tests the second one.
Highlighting has an additional problem: it's a decision about what matters, made while reading, and then usually never revisited. The highlighting itself accomplishes little. It just feels like work because it involves a pen.
Self-testing feels worse, which is exactly the point. Struggling to recall something is uncomfortable, and that discomfort is the mechanism.
This is where most advice stops being useful, so here's what it looks like in practice.
Close the book and write down what you remember. Then open it and check. The gap between what you wrote and what's there is your study list. This takes ten minutes and outperforms an hour of rereading.
Turn headings into questions. A section titled "Causes of the First World War" becomes "What were the causes of the First World War?" Answer it from memory before looking.
Use past tests and end-of-chapter questions. The questions your teacher already set are the best available practice material, and most students treat them as optional.
Flashcards, if they're used properly. The card has to be answered before it's flipped. A student who flips immediately is rereading with extra steps.
Explain it out loud to someone. Teaching the material forces retrieval and exposes the gaps within about thirty seconds.
The rule underneath all of these: if your teen can see the answer while they're studying, they're not studying. They're reading.
Four thirty-minute sessions across a week beat one two-hour session the night before, for the same total time.
Practically:
Review new material the same day it's taught, for ten minutes
Return to it again a few days later
Revisit it a week after that
Keep touching it lightly through the term rather than reviving it at exam time
The reason this feels wrong is that forgetting a little between sessions makes the next session harder. Harder is the point. Retrieving something you've partly forgotten strengthens it more than retrieving something still fresh.
The practical obstacle isn't understanding this — it's that distributed practice requires planning and cramming doesn't. Which is why study skills work is usually as much about scheduling as about technique, and why it's a large part of what one-to-one study skills support ends up doing.
Is it the study method or the material itself? A free assessment will show you whether your teen has gaps in the content or just needs a better approach to it — usually in about an hour.
This is the real difficulty, and it's worth being honest that it's harder than knowing the research.
Don't lead with the research. A teenager told their study method is wrong will defend it. Suggesting an experiment works better than delivering a verdict.
Run one comparison. Propose self-testing for a single unit test and rereading for the next. Most students are convinced by their own results in a way they won't be by a study.
Start with the subject they're most worried about. Motivation is highest where the stakes feel real.
Accept partial adoption. A student who adds ten minutes of self-testing to their existing routine has captured most of the benefit. Insisting they abandon highlighting entirely turns a method change into an argument.
Watch the confidence signal. A student who says "I know this" after rereading and then does poorly has a calibration problem, not a knowledge problem. Self-testing fixes calibration faster than anything else, because it makes not knowing visible before the exam does.
Technique isn't everything, and a few conditions matter enough to mention.
Sleep beats late revision, consistently, especially the night before. Nothing recovered in a late session compensates for the loss.
Phones away, not face-down. The presence of a phone is enough to fragment attention even unused.
Short blocks with real breaks. Most students overestimate how long they can concentrate. Forty minutes with a genuine ten-minute break is more productive than two unbroken hours.
One subject at a time per block, particularly for material that's easily confused.
Not completely, but it does far less than students think and the research rates it low utility. Its main problem is that it feels like studying while mostly being reading with a pen in hand. If your teen wants to keep highlighting, treat it as the first step — the highlighted material then has to be turned into questions and tested, which is where the learning actually happens.
For a unit test, light review should begin the day the material is taught rather than the week before the test. For exams, three to four weeks of spread-out review beats any amount of concentrated cramming. The total hours matter less than how they're distributed, which is the single most counterintuitive part of the research.
It can get a student through a test the next day, which is why it survives — it produces a short-term result that feels like proof it works. What it doesn't do is build knowledge that lasts into an exam or the following course. In cumulative subjects like math and the sciences, a term of cramming is why Grade 12 often feels impossible.
That pattern usually points at method rather than effort, and it's the most common version of this problem. Hours spent rereading produce familiarity without recall, so a student can genuinely feel prepared and still be unable to retrieve anything under exam conditions. Ask how they study, not how long — the answer is usually rereading.
Yes, with a slight adjustment: practice testing in math means working problems without looking at worked examples first. The equivalent of rereading is watching someone solve a problem and feeling like you could do it. Distributed practice matters even more in math than elsewhere, because the material is cumulative and skills fade without regular use.
The two study techniques with the strongest research behind them are self-testing and spreading study out over time. The five most popular ones, including highlighting and rereading, were rated low utility in a major review — they feel productive without reliably improving results.
If your teen is putting in the hours and not seeing it in their marks, the method is the first place to look. Talk to us about how they're actually studying — we'll work out whether the problem is the approach or a gap in the material, and match them with a certified teacher who can fix either, in your home or online.
About the author
President of Tutorbright