Ten Techniques, Ranked
This monograph evaluates ten learning techniques developed by cognitive and educational psychologists to help students better regulate their learning. The authors assessed each technique's utility based on its effectiveness across different variables, such as student age, learning conditions, and the types of materials and tasks involved.
In 2013, five cognitive and educational psychologists (John Dunlosky, Katherine Rawson, Elizabeth Marsh, Mitchell Nathan and Daniel Willingham) published Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The question wasn't "what is memory," but "which ways of studying actually work, and how confident can we be?" They took ten techniques an ordinary student might plausibly use and rated each one by utility.
What does utility mean in this context?
Utility in this monograph refers to a recommendation rating — high, moderate, or low — assigned to each learning technique to reflect its overall effectiveness and practical value for students and teachers.
This assessment is based on how well a technique's benefits generalize across four specific categories of variables:
- Learning Conditions: These include the context of study, such as whether a student works alone or in a group, and implementation details like "dosage" (how many times a technique is used) or timing.
- Student Characteristics: This evaluates if the technique works for learners of different ages, ability levels, and levels of prior knowledge.
- Materials: This looks at whether the technique is effective for different types of content, such as vocabulary, mathematical concepts, or complex science texts.
- Criterion Tasks: This assesses the technique's impact on various outcome measures, including memory (recognition and recall), comprehension, and the application of knowledge.
The Three Levels of Utility
- High Utility: Assigned to techniques whose effects are robust and generalize widely across different learners, materials, and tasks.
- Moderate Utility: Given to techniques that show promise and generalize across some variables but may lack enough evidence in specific areas, such as effectiveness in a real classroom setting or over long retention intervals.
- Low Utility: Assigned when a technique’s benefits are limited to very specific conditions, if it is difficult to implement effectively, or if it does not consistently improve performance compared to other methods.
The authors also emphasize that a rating can be impacted by the amount of available research; a technique might receive a lower utility assessment simply because there is "insufficient evidence" to prove it works consistently across all the categories mentioned above.
High-Utility Techniques
These techniques are considered robust, easy to use, and broadly applicable across many learning situations.
- Practice Testing: This involves low-stakes or no-stakes activities like self-testing or taking practice questions. It is highly effective because it triggers "elaborative retrieval processes," creating multiple pathways in memory to access information. It has been shown to benefit learners of all ages and improves both memory and comprehension.
The active recall of a fact from within is, as a rule, better than its impression from without.
Edward Thorndike — 1906 - Distributed Practice: This is the strategy of spreading study activities out over time rather than "cramming" in a single session. Spaced learning consistently leads to better long-term retention than massed practice. The ideal lag between study sessions is typically about 10–20% of the desired retention interval.
Moderate-Utility Techniques
These techniques show promise but received moderate ratings due to limited evidence in certain areas or specific conditions required for effectiveness.
- Elaborative Interrogation: Students prompt themselves to generate an explanation for why a fact is true. While effective for learning factual information, more research is needed to determine if it persists over long delays or helps with complex comprehension.
- Self-Explanation: This involves students explaining how new information relates to what they already know, or detailing the steps taken during problem-solving. It is applicable across many domains but can be time-consuming.
- Interleaved Practice: This involves mixing different kinds of problems or materials within a single study session, rather than blocking them by type. It is particularly effective for mathematical skills as it helps students learn to discriminate between different solution methods.
Low-Utility Techniques
These techniques are often popular among students but were rated low because they are frequently implemented ineffectively or have limited generalizability.
- Summarization and Imagery for Text: These can help some students, but they often require extensive training to be used effectively and may only work for certain types of materials.
- Highlighting and Underlining: Despite being very common, these techniques do little to boost performance and can actually hinder the ability to make higher-level inferences by focusing too much on individual facts rather than connections between concepts.
- Keyword Mnemonic: This uses mental images to associate words, but it is difficult to apply to abstract terms and often fails to produce durable long-term retention.
- Rereading: This is the most frequently reported study technique, yet it is consistently inferior to more active strategies like practice testing or elaborative interrogation.
| Utility | Technique |
|---|---|
| High | Practice testing · Distributed practice |
| Moderate | Elaborative interrogation · Self-explanation · Interleaved practice |
| Low | Summarisation · Highlighting and underlining · Keyword mnemonic · Imagery for text · Rereading |
Conclusion and Implementation
The authors conclude that many teachers and students are not informed about which techniques are most effective. Educational psychology textbooks often provide insufficient coverage of these strategies, leaving students to rely on less effective methods like highlighting and rereading. The authors recommend that teachers explicitly train students in high-utility techniques and incorporate them into lesson plans. For example, by starting classes with brief practice tests or interleaving different problem types in homework assignments.
Some effective techniques are underutilized — many teachers do not learn about them, and hence many students do not use them, despite evidence suggesting that the techniques could benefit student achievement with little added effort.
Source
The full monograph runs past fifty pages of dense academic prose (pages 4 to 58 of the journal issue). Most people don't need all of it, the table above is the part that matters, and the discipline to act on it. For the narrative version of the same findings, the bookshelf is the gentler on-ramp; for the source itself, it's Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham (2013), Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1).
Read more
- The five research findings Norudit's whole method is built on: Built on the Science of Memory
- A book about the common misconceptions in learning written by 2 psychologists and compiled by a third, a writer: Make It Stick
- The sources behind the majority of the ideas behind the Norudit Academy: The Bookshelf Behind the Method