We didn't invent any of this.

Five researchers reviewed ten of the most common study techniques and rated each one on how broadly the evidence supports it.

Practice testing and distributed practice were the two rated high utility. Summarisation, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery for text learning and rereading were all rated low utility.

Students studied science texts either by building concept maps or by practising retrieving the material from memory, then sat a short-answer test a week later.

In Experiment 1 (80 students), retrieval practice scored 0.67 against concept mapping's 0.45 on the one-week test. In Experiment 2 (120 students), 84% of students did better after retrieval practice, while 75% had predicted concept mapping would serve them as well or better.

Students read prose passages and then either studied them again or were tested on them, with a final recall test after five minutes, two days or a week.

In Experiment 2, students who studied four times recalled 83% of the ideas after five minutes against 71% for students who studied once and were tested three times. A week later the order reversed: 40% for the repeat studiers, 61% for the tested group. Experiment 1 shows the same reversal on a simpler design, 81% against 75% at five minutes and 42% against 56% after a week.

Eighth graders read a text about the circulatory system. One group was prompted to explain each sentence to themselves as they went; the other read the same text twice with no prompting.

The prompted group understood more of the material afterwards, and the gap was widest on the questions that needed inference rather than recall.

Across three studies, people with a goal either specified in advance when and where they would act on it, or held the goal without such a plan.

In Study 1, among goals the participants themselves rated difficult, 62% of those who had formed a specific plan completed them against 22% of those who had not. In Study 2, 12 of 17 students with a plan wrote an assigned report in the two days after Christmas Eve, against 6 of 19 without one.

The two authors pooled the accumulated experimental work on if-then plans and measured the overall effect on whether people reached their goals.

Across 94 independent tests, forming an if-then plan had a positive effect of medium-to-large size on goal attainment, d = .65.

The authors gathered 138 studies covering 19,951 people, each of which randomly assigned participants either to something designed to make them monitor their progress or to a control group.

Prompting people to monitor their progress increased how often they did so, and increased goal attainment by a small-to-moderate amount, d = 0.40.

The authors broke 122 evaluations, drawn from 101 studies and covering 44,747 adults, into the 26 individual techniques the interventions used, then asked which techniques explained why some worked better than others.

Self-monitoring explained more of the difference between interventions than any other single technique. Interventions that combined self-monitoring with at least one other self-regulation technique averaged an effect of 0.42, against 0.26 for those that did not.