Unreviewed — agent-drafted
This card was drafted by a software agent. It quotes nothing from the work itself; everything below is a description written for this catalogue, and the bibliographic details were checked against a public catalogue on the date shown.
We recommend it as the first paper anyone reads here: it is short, the design fits on one page, and it is the source of the retrieval prompts throughout Learn.
The experiment behind the single most repeated piece of study advice in this product. Students read prose passages and then either studied again or took a test; on a later retention test the tested group came out ahead, while immediately afterwards the repeated-study group had looked better.
That a test is not only a measurement, it is an event that changes what you keep — and that your own sense of how well you have learned something tracks the short-term result rather than the long-term one. That mismatch is why re-reading stays popular.
Two things to try
- Read the method section before the discussion, and write down the two conditions and the retention interval in your own words.
- Run the design on yourself: study one page twice, test yourself on another, and check both a week later.
- Write down, before checking, which of the two you expect to feel more confident about. Compare with what you actually retain.
Level, and what it means here
This text assumes you have met the vocabulary before, usually from one of the beginner items here. It is a description of the book, not of you.