Close the Book: The Study Habit That Beats Rereading

Most of us learned to study the same way. Read the chapter. Highlight the important parts. Read it again the night before. It feels productive, and for a test the next morning, it often works well enough.

But if you want to remember something next month, a body of research going back decades suggests a different habit works better. It's less comfortable, it takes less time, and almost nobody does it by default. You close the book and try to recall what you just read.

Psychologists call this the testing effect, or retrieval practice. Think of a test not just as a way to measure learning, but as a way to cause it.

The experiment

One of the clearest demonstrations came in 2006 from Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke at Washington University in St. Louis. College students read short prose passages, the kind of thing you might find in a textbook, about topics like sea otters and the sun.

In one experiment, some students studied a passage in four short sessions, reading it over and over. Others read it once and then spent the next three sessions writing down everything they could remember, with no feedback and no peeking.

Five minutes later, the rereaders did better: about 83 percent of the passage recalled, versus 71 percent for the recall group. No surprise. The material was fresh.

A week later, the picture flipped. The recall group remembered about 61 percent of the passage. The rereaders remembered about 40 percent.

The numbers behind that result are striking. Over their study sessions, the rereaders had read the passage about 14 times. The recall group had read it about three and a half times. Less exposure, more memory.

Why rereading fools us

There was one more twist. Before the final test, students in that study were asked how well they thought they'd remember the passage in a week. The rereaders were more confident than the recall group, even though they ended up remembering less.

That's the trap. Rereading feels smooth. The words look familiar, and familiarity feels like knowing. Pulling information out of your own head feels harder and messier, and you notice what you've forgotten. That struggle feels like failure. The research suggests it's part of what makes the information stick.

This isn't a one-study wonder. The testing effect has been replicated many times, across different kinds of material and with learners of many ages. Reviews of learning research consistently rank practice testing among the most useful study techniques available.

A very old argument

There's something fitting about this finding. More than two thousand years ago, in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the invention of writing. The king who receives the invention is unimpressed. Writing, he warns, will be a remedy not for memory but for reminding. People will have the words on the page without having them in their heads.

Socrates wasn't entirely right; we only know the story because Plato wrote it down. But he was onto something. Having notes isn't the same as knowing. What turns the page into something you own is the act of retrieving it, explaining it and being challenged on it.

Why this suits experienced learners

If you've spent a career in meetings, negotiations or courtrooms, you already know a version of this. The client brief you had to present from memory is the one you still remember. The report you skimmed is gone.

Many people in their 50s, 60s and 70s are taking on hard new subjects: a language, an instrument, a new field for a second career, the details of a family estate. Some worry that learning is simply harder now. We won't promise this technique changes that. The studies above mostly used college students, and we make no claims here about brain health. What the research does offer is a better way to spend your study time, whatever your age. You are likely to remember more of what you put in the effort to retrieve.

Experience helps in another way, too. You're probably more comfortable than you were at 20 with the discomfort of not knowing yet, and with checking your own work honestly. Retrieval practice rewards exactly that.

Try this: the close-the-book routine

The next time you read something you want to keep, a chapter, a briefing, a set of vocabulary words, try this:

• Read it once, carefully. No highlighting marathon.
• Close it and write or say what you remember. A few bullet points, or explain it out loud as if to a colleague. Don't look back until you're done.
• Then check. Open the material and notice what you missed or got wrong. That gap is your study list.
• Do it again later. Tomorrow, then a few days after that, try recalling again before you reread. Spacing the attempts out tends to help even more than doing them all at once.

A few easy ways to build it into ordinary life:

• After a meeting, jot down the three main decisions from memory before you look at anyone's notes.
• After a book chapter, tell your spouse or a friend what it said over dinner.
• Learning names at a new club or board? Quiz yourself on the drive home rather than rereading the roster.
• Using flashcards? Make sure you say the answer before you flip the card. Recognizing it after you see it doesn't count.

Rereading feels like learning. Recalling is what builds memory. The good news is that the better method also takes less time.

Sources

• Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. Full text (PDF) · PubMed
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. PubMed
• 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. PubMed
• Plato, Phaedrus, 274c–277a (the story of Theuth and Thamus). Perseus Digital Library