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Students who use the "obvious" way to study a book (highlight and review) commonly do very poorly on quizzes which require a genuine understanding of the material. Often such students spend a considerable time studying, for example, they may spend six hours on a chapter, yet do poorly on the chapter quiz. They say things like, "I studied six hours but I still got a D! What am I doing wrong?"

The student who gets a "six hour D" often goes to extraordinary efforts to "work with" the text, without ever really reading it slowly and carefully to understand it. This student may spend hours writing down every answer to every question, or highlighting all the "answers" and reviewing them. But almost every time a student who gets a six hour D proves unable to answer study questions from the chapter, providing the book is closed so the student cannot see the answer.

For example, the placebo effect is discussed in Chapter 1 of our book. A student who studied for six hours and got a D on the Chapter 1 quiz may claim to have put a sincere effort into studying, reading the whole chapter, probably more than once, and going over all the answers to all the questions. The student typically assures me that the material was intelligible and that the student understood the answers to the study questions. On one such occasion I opened Chapter 1 and put my finger down on the first study question I found, which was, "What is the placebo effect."

The student hesitated. "I remember that. I studied that.."

I said, "Take your time...."

The student finally came up with this: "I remember it was a sugar pill or something."

How could the student avoid such difficulties? I usually advise such students to test themselves the same way I tested the student:

1. block off the text
2. attempt to answer to a study question

In a nutshell: the student should be engaged in self-testing, and it must be self-testing that works to give the student feedback about whether or not material is really learned. Self-testing is not difficult, but it does not occur automatically. One must set out to do self-testing as an explicit goal. The technique is easy, in the case of my book, because there are study questions in the margin. A student simply reads the questions and tries to answer them without looking at the text. Based on my experience, I can say with assurance that if a student cannot answer the questions this way, he or she will not do well on my tests. If the student can answer the questions this way, he or she usually gets As on my tests.

Notice the fundamental difference between two strategies. One produces the six-hour D, the other produces A grades:

• Strategy 1: Match the question to an answer on the page. Perhaps highlight the answer. Look back and forth until the answer is understood. [This produces poor results because people usually feel like they understand something while they are reading it.]

• Strategy 2: Read the material, trying to understand the underlying ideas. A few minutes later, go back to the page, block off the text, read the question, and see if the answer can be retrieved from memory. [This reveals whether a person has truly understood the ideas and retains them in retrievable form.]

Clearly these students are deceiving themselves about whether they really understand they material, and it is not hard to see why. They probably feel that they understand the material while they are looking at it. But they cannot recall it independently, given only the study question as a cue, and (most importantly) they are not testing themselves to find this out.

Self-testing is an example of what psychologists call metacognition, or "thinking about thinking." The self-testing procedure I recommend--Procedure #2 above--is a simple metacognitive procedure which allows students to determine whether or not they truly understand the material. I maintain that "memorization" is irrelevant to this process. Good memory comes from comprehension, not the activities most students called "memorization." No student should be forced to "memorize" over 100 answers to study questions anyway; that is torture. But students can and should be asked to comprehend new ideas. If they comprehend ideas, memory comes naturally.

In general, memorization is a poor approach to college-level studying. Memorization of superficial details will not work in any but the most pathetically superficial college courses. Instead, you have to understand ideas. This means building something new in your brain. The way to find out if you can "construct" an idea is to require yourself to produce it, given a modest cue such as a study question. That is why the How to Study this Book sheet which I give to my students recommends that they practice speaking aloud the answers to the study questions without looking at the page. Even if you are not using my book, and your book does not have study questions, you can (and should) adopt some form of self-testing strategy resembling this.

Here is an e-mail message I received from a student which relates directly to this.

Your study questions are making it easier for me to score a decent grade on your tests, but they are providing me with much more than easier ways to find answers. They are helping me to learn to spot more important points in other texts that I read, by imagining study questions next to the text. Up to this point, I would read an assignment that I knew I would be tested on and find myself not absorbing what was being said because I was worrying too much about picking out the important information.

I am now learning to read--- just read--then go back to each paragraph and make a study question for it in the margins. Then I go back again and answer the questions.

...To sum this up, I am getting more than knowledge of Introductory Psychology from your class, you are helping with my study skills. Please continue to offer this to your future students because I am sure there are a lot of others out here in Studentland that need just this type of help.

[--Fall, '95 student]

Dewey, R. (1997, February 12) The "6 hour D" and how to avoid it. [Online]. Available: http://www.psywww.com/discuss/chap00/6hourd.htm.

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