Author: Kim Tierney, Director of Academic Coaching
Read time: 5 minutes
This content was largely informed by the book Study Like a Champ. We use this book to structure our Study Smarter Not Harder summer book study.
This content was created with the assistance of AI. All content was reviewed and edited by Tierney Education for accuracy, clarity, and usefulness.
If you can't recall something, you probably don't know it well. That sounds obvious once you say it out loud, but it's the opposite of how most students actually study. Rereading a chapter or scanning through notes feels productive because the material feels familiar. Familiarity, though, isn't the same thing as knowing something, it's just recognition, and recognition is a much lower bar than recall.
First, Some Vocabulary
A few terms are worth knowing clearly before we go further:
Recognition: Identifying something you've learned when you see it again.
Example: choosing the right answer on a multiple-choice test.
Recall: Bringing information to mind from memory, without the information in front of you.
Example: answering an open-ended test question.
Retrieval practice: Actively trying to recall information you've learned, in order to strengthen your memory.
Example: quizzing yourself by explaining photosynthesis to a friend.
Successive relearning: Combining spaced practice and retrieval practice together, reviewing material multiple times and only moving on once you've correctly remembered it each time.
The key takeaway across all four: the more you actively recall information across time, the stronger your memory becomes.
Why Retrieval Practice Works
Retrieval practice uses the same metacognition strategies we've talked about before, it helps you monitor your own learning and adjust when something isn't sticking. It's also just plain good for memory on its own.
This isn't a minor effect. In a well-known set of experiments by researchers Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, students who practiced recalling a passage retained significantly more of it a week later than students who spent the same amount of time rereading it. Actively pulling information out of memory strengthens it far more than simply putting it back in again.
Psychologist Robert Bjork calls this a "desirable difficulty." Retrieval feels harder than rereading, because it is harder. That difficulty is the whole point. The struggle to recall something is what strengthens the memory. If retrieval feels easy and effortless, you've usually already got it. If it's hard, or you can't do it at all, that's valuable information, not a failure. It's telling you exactly what still needs work.
That's part of why flashcards work so well as a study tool: not just as a way to review, but as a signal. If you flip a card and draw a blank, you've just learned something important about your own preparation, and that's worth more than another pass of rereading your notes would have been. If you want a structured system for putting that signal to use, we've written before about the 4-Box Review System, which organizes your flashcards based on exactly this kind of feedback.
Successive Relearning: Combining Spacing and Retrieval
Retrieval practice gets even more effective when you pair it with spacing it out over time, a combination called successive relearning. Here's how it works:
Answer a question. Try to recall the information.
Evaluate the answer. Check what you got right or wrong.
If it's correct, put it aside. You've got it, for now.
If it's incorrect, restudy. Go back and review the material.
Continue with the set until everything is correct.
Then come back and do it again another day. Each correct answer makes the memory stronger, and cycling through the material this way, focusing only on what you get wrong, turns short-term recall into long-term memory. This is really the same spiral we've described in our post on spaced practice: review, space it out, review again.
Putting It Into Practice
A few simple ways to build retrieval fluency into your daily studying:
Test yourself. Try to recall information without looking. Use practice questions, self-quizzes, or make up your own. The more you retrieve, the stronger your memory gets.
Use flashcards. Quiz yourself on key terms, definitions, formulas, or concepts. Quick, simple, and genuinely effective. There is a reason why this is a go-to recommendation!
Explain it out loud. Teach the concept to someone who isn't familiar with it, and let them ask follow-up questions. Teaching forces you to notice the gaps in your own understanding.
Use the cover-and-compare method. Cover important vocabulary or problem steps, write down your answer, then uncover it and compare. Check, correct, and repeat until you actually know it.
A Note on AI
Tools like Quizlet, and AI tools more broadly, can absolutely be useful learning aids. But the rule here is simple: garbage in, garbage out. Students who use AI tools to support their learning are getting ahead. Students who try to outsource their learning to AI are falling behind.
Platforms like NotebookLM can gather your notes and generate practice quizzes or flashcards for you, and that can be a real time-saver. But keep in mind: part of the learning actually happens in the process of making the study materials yourself. Deciding what's important enough to turn into a flashcard, or how to phrase a practice question, is itself a form of retrieval practice. Don't outsource your thinking to the robots. Use the tools to support the work, not to replace it.
