mytetz › Study guides › What to use instead of a highlighter
What to use instead of a highlighter
A highlighter marks a page. It does not move a fact into your memory. In 2013 a review of ten study techniques put "highlighting and underlining" in its lowest group. Replace the pen with one of three actions: a question in the margin, a closed page and a spoken answer, or a one-line note in your own words.
Key points
- Dunlosky and four colleagues rated five techniques as low utility in 2013: summarisation, highlighting and underlining, the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, and rereading.
- Low utility means weak evidence or narrow conditions. It does not mean zero effect.
- A highlighter feels productive. The feeling is the problem, not the colour.
- Mark nothing on the first pass. Mark only what you fail to recall later.
Why does a highlighter feel so effective?
A highlighter produces a visible result. The page changes colour, and the change looks like progress. The work is also easy: you decide that a sentence matters, and you drag a pen across it. You never have to produce the sentence from memory.
That gap explains the problem. A coloured page is easy to recognise later. Recognition is not recall. In an examination, or in a real conversation, nobody shows you the sentence and asks whether it looks familiar. You have to produce it.
- The illusion of competence
- A false judgement about your own memory. A page that feels familiar seems like a page that you know. Koriat and Bjork named the effect in 2005.
Roediger and Karpicke measured this effect directly in 2006. The students who reread a passage predicted the best memory for themselves. One week later that same group recalled the least.
What did the 2013 review find?
Five researchers reviewed ten common study techniques for Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They rated each technique on the breadth and the strength of the evidence behind it. Two techniques reached the top group. Five reached the lowest group.
| Rating | Techniques | What the rating means |
|---|---|---|
| High utility | Practice testing, distributed practice | The benefit holds across ages, materials and test types. |
| Low utility | Summarisation, highlighting and underlining, the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading | The evidence is weak, or the benefit appears only in narrow conditions. |
Read the low rating with care. The authors did not find that a highlighter harms a learner. They found that the benefit is small, that it does not hold across conditions, and that a learner can get much more from the same minutes.
What do you use instead?
Each method below costs about the same time as a highlighter. Each one forces you to produce something, and production is the part that a pen removes.
| Method | What you do | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| The closed page | Read a short section. Cover it. Say the main point aloud. Open the page and compare. | It is practice testing, the top-rated technique in the 2013 review. |
| The margin question | Instead of a mark on a sentence, write the question that the sentence answers. | The page becomes a test. You can reread the questions and answer them later. |
| The one-line note | Write one sentence in your own words. Do not copy a phrase from the text. | Your own words prove that you understood. A copied phrase proves nothing. |
| The delayed mark | Read with no pen. One day later, recall the section. Mark only the parts that you missed. | The marks now show your real gaps, and not your first impression. |
How to change the habit in one session
- Put the highlighter away before you start. Keep a pencil.
- Read one section of about 300 words.
- Cover the text. Say the main point aloud in one sentence.
- Open the text. Find each point that you missed.
- Write one margin question for each gap.
- One day later, answer your own margin questions before you read anything.
What does a good margin question look like?
A weak question repeats a word from the text. A strong question asks for the mechanism, the cause or the limit. Compare these three on the same paragraph about an immune response.
| Question | What it tests | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| "What is an antibody?" | One definition from the first sentence. | Weak. You can answer it from the shape of the word. |
| "How does the body recognise a virus it has never met?" | The mechanism across the whole paragraph. | Strong. It forces you to join several sentences. |
| "When does that recognition fail?" | The limit of the mechanism. | Strongest. A limit shows whether you understood the rule. |
Write one question for each paragraph that you would have marked. A page of six questions takes about the same time as a page of six marks, and you can use the questions tomorrow. A mark gives you nothing to answer.
When does a highlighter still help?
A highlighter has one honest use: it finds a place again. A long document, a legal text or a manual holds passages that you must return to. A mark makes the return fast.
Three rules keep that use safe.
- Mark a location, and not a fact that you want to remember.
- Mark after the first read, and not during it.
- Keep the marks rare. A page with ten marks holds no signal.
What does the research show?
The lowest group, and what put it there
The 2013 review found that a mark on a page rarely helps a later test. In several studies the benefit disappeared when the test asked the learner to produce an answer rather than to recognise one. The review also noted a risk: a mark can pull attention to single sentences and away from the connection between them.
What replaces it, measured
Roediger and Karpicke (2006) compared a test against a repeated read. One week later the test group recalled 61% of the passage. The repeated-read group recalled 40%. Note the limit in the same paper: on a test five minutes after study, the repeated read won, 81% against 75%. The benefit of a test appears after a delay, not before it.
Karpicke and Blunt (2011) went further. They compared retrieval practice against concept maps, a much more active method than a highlighter. One week later, on a short-answer test, retrieval scored 0.67 and the concept map scored 0.45 (d = 1.50).
Sources
- 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. doi:10.1177/1529100612453266
- Roediger, H. L., III, & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-Enhanced Learning. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
- Karpicke, J. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772–775. doi:10.1126/science.1199327
- Koriat, A., & Bjork, R. A. (2005). Illusions of competence in monitoring one's knowledge during study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(2), 187–194.
Common questions
Does a highlighter damage my memory?
No. The 2013 review found a small and unreliable benefit, and not harm. The cost is the time: the same minutes spent on a test return much more.
What about a digital highlighter in an e-book?
The same reasoning applies. The action still asks you to recognise a sentence, and not to produce it. A digital mark has one advantage: you can export the marks and turn each one into a question.
Is a colour code better than one colour?
No study supports a colour code over a single colour for later recall. A code adds a decision during the read, and that decision takes attention from the text.
My teacher told me to highlight. What do I do?
Follow the instruction, then add one step. After the read, cover the page and say what the marked parts mean. The mark costs you little when a test follows it.
Where do you go next?
- How to test yourself while you read — the method that replaces the pen.
- How to study on your own — the full loop, in six steps.
Start with a topic
Try the closed-page method on something new. Pick a topic, read one short step, then highlight a phrase to ask about it instead of to mark it.
Open the catalogue