For material you must memorize, test yourself with questions in the form you will use later; do not count a verbatim run-through as done

Closing the book and testing yourself helps beyond the exact words you memorized. Across 192 comparisons and more than ten thousand people pooled, it also helps on questions with a changed format, on application problems, and on reasoning problems, by a moderate-to-small amount. Two cases work least well: swapping the question and the answer, and material you only saw in the book and were never tested on.

Cost

No money, and no extra time. What changes is only the practice: replace "run through it verbatim" with "test yourself with questions in the form you will use later." The hard part is first being clear how you will use this material later.

Benefit

A meta-analysis pooling more than 40 years of research, with 67 published and unpublished papers, 122 experiments, 192 transfer effect sizes, and 10382 people in total. Compared with a control that looked again but was not tested, practice testing transferred learning to other situations, effect size d=0.40 (95% CI 0.31 to 0.50). Transfer was strongest when the test used a different question type, application and reasoning problems, medical-diagnosis-style questions, or near-meaning cue words. Transfer was weakest when stimulus and response were swapped, when material had been seen in first learning but never tested, and on example-style problems. Three moderators strongly affect whether positive transfer appears: whether response format matched between practice and test, whether retrieval practice with detailed feedback was done, and whether the first test was answered correctly. The authors also corrected for publication bias two ways. Moderator effect sizes changed little, but the intercept estimate was clearly pushed down: when none of the conditions above hold, positive transfer often does not appear

Notes

Everyday "memorize" bundles two things: going over the material again (rereading, highlighting), and actively recalling with the book closed. The first ranks lowest in the review that ordered ten study methods; for the ratings themselves see item 16 (do not treat highlighting, rereading, and writing summaries as main study methods). What to do is the second: actively recall with the book closed, as in item 14 (close the book and self-test), and spread it over several days, as in item 15 (spread over several days). Method: first be clear how you will use it later—selecting on a paper, or judging on the spot—then write questions in that form and test yourself. Swapping directions and testing the other way is also worth doing, because in this meta-analysis transfer in the swapped direction is weakest, so both directions need practice.

Sources · 1

1. Pan SC, Rickard TC (2018). Transfer of test-enhanced learning: meta-analytic review and synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 144(7), 710-756. doi.org/10.1037/bul0000151