Summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery for text, and rereading receive low utility assessments¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r3 · q2
Currency · newest study 2013 · checked against its sources 2026-10-20 (automated, 1 of 1 entry) · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? The monograph rates summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, and rereading as low utility because their benefits are limited in generality or evidence. → Dunlosky 2013

Evidence¶

Dunlosky 2013¶

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

q2 · i? · review · r3

The monograph's overall assessment section lists the five low-utility techniques and states they "were rated as low utility for numerous reasons," including limited conditions of benefit and short-lived effects for the keyword mnemonic.

"Five techniques received a low utility assessment: summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, and rereading. These techniques were rated as low utility for numerous reasons."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Concreteness, imagery, and verbal associative processes play major roles across multiple educational domains — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it

• Mnemonic Instruction Improves Recall For Students With Disabilities — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it

• Highlighting shows low utility for improving learning outcomes — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Learner highlighting of text gives a small memory benefit but no reliable comprehension benefit, and evidence on other forms of annotation is not yet recorded here — related
• Rereading Is A Low Utility Study Strategy — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• A review chapter (Karpicke 2017) reports, second-hand, experiments in which retrieval practice produced more learning than concept mapping (Karpicke & Blunt 2011) and than imagery strategies such as the keyword mnemonic (Karpicke & Smith 2012) — related
• Quizzing outperforms no/filler activity, fewer-question testing and restudying, with a larger advantage over no/filler activity (low reexposure) than over restudying (high reexposure); against other elaborative strategies its advantage is small and not significant. — related
• Practice testing and distributed practice receive high utility assessments because their benefits generalize widely across learners, tasks, and educational contexts — related
• Rereading is less effective than retrieval practice — related
• Training in text structure improves college students' summaries, but summarizing has not been shown here to improve recall or writing more than rereading or other active reading — related
• Explicit transfer instructions, in which trainees discuss how trained strategies could apply to a new task, produced reliable transfer of imagery and sentence-generation training to unpracticed text learning in older adults — related
• Comprehension-test expectancy tended to be more effective than delayed-keywords listing and rereading, though interventions did not substantially differ overall — related
• The advantage of recitation over rereading is greater the less connected the learning material (Kühn 1914; Gates 1917) — related
• Descriptive habit-strength ratings rank highlighting highest, followed by rereading, self-testing, and concept mapping — related
• Ineffective learning strategies show substantially higher habit strength than effective strategies in a proof-of-concept survey — a narrower finding that bears on this claim