mytetz › Study guides
Study guides
Six guides show you how to study alone. Each guide answers one question. Each guide names the research behind its answer. The methods come from cognitive psychology, and a researcher tested each one in a controlled experiment. You can apply every method today.
The four findings that matter most
- A test beats a second read, but only after a delay of one day or more.
- A gap between two reviews beats two reviews in one sitting.
- A highlighter marks a page. It does not move a fact into your memory.
- A method that feels hard often works better than a method that feels easy.
Which guide do you need?
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How to study on your own
A method in six steps, for a person with no teacher and no course.
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What to use instead of a highlighter
A 2013 review rated five popular techniques as low utility. Here is what to do.
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How to test yourself while you read
Active recall, with no flashcard deck and no extra software.
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When to review what you read
The forgetting curve, and a review schedule that fits a normal week.
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How students study now
What the 2026 surveys measure, and the sample size behind each number.
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Why a person stops an online course
What the completion data really says, and six steps that help you finish.
How do we choose what goes on these pages?
We publish a claim only when a named study supports it. We give the authors, the year and the journal. We give the sample size. We give the year of the data.
We leave a number out when no reliable source exists. Two examples: nobody has measured the share of study that happens on a telephone; nobody has measured a trustworthy average for the length of a study session. So these pages state no number for either one.
Why can you trust these numbers?
Every guide links to the primary paper. You can open the paper and check the number yourself. Where a popular figure has no primary source, the guide says so and names the problem.
One example
Many sites state a 2026 completion rate for an online course. We found no named primary source for those figures. The best measurement we found covers 2017 and 2018, and it comes from a paper in Science. The guide gives that year, and it explains what the figure counts.
Start with a topic
A method needs something to work on. The mytetz catalogue holds 29 topics. Pick one, read a short step, then highlight any phrase that you do not understand.
Open the catalogue