#readwise # Highlighting and Its Relation to Distributed Study and Students’ Metacognitive Beliefs  ## Metadata - Author: [[Carole L. Yue, et al.]] - Full Title: Highlighting and Its Relation to Distributed Study and Students’ Metacognitive Beliefs ## Highlights **We examined highlighting in relation to distributed study and students’ attitudes about highlighting as a study strategy.** Participants read a text passage twice while highlighting or not, with their readings either distributed or massed, and followed by a week-delayed test. **An overall benefit of highlighting occurred, with highlighting being especially beneficial with massed readings of the passages. Importantly, highlighting did not impair knowledge of non-highlighted information.** (Page 2) --- Several studies have shown a significant benefit for underlined or highlighted text (e.g., Fass and Schumacher 1978; Fowler and Barker 1974; Nist and Hogrebe 1987; Nist and Simpson 1988; Johnson 1988; Rickards and August 1975), whereas others have not (e.g., Arnold 1942; Hoon 1974; Idstein and Jenkins 1972; Peterson 1992; Stordahl and Christensen 1956; Wade and Trathen 1989). (Page 2) --- ### Potential Advantages of Highlighting **From a depth-of-processing perspective, just the act of deciding what to mark and what not to mark may lead students to process textual information at a deeper, more evaluative level than they would when simply reading it** (Craik and Lockhart 1972; Nist and Hogrebe 1987). (Page 3) ^puwgvd --- Another potential benefit of text-marking could be a type of von Restorff effect (Wallace 1965). **Specifically, highlighting may make the marked portion of text more memorable because it stands out from the surrounding non-highlighted text.** Indeed, some evidence supports this type of role for highlighting: **When students read pre-highlighted passages, they recall more of the highlighted information and less of the non-highlighted information compared to students who receive an unmarked copy of the same passage** (Fowler and Barker 1974; Silvers and Kreiner 1997). (Page 3) ^5nxk9w --- ### Potential Disadvantages of Highlighting others have argued that selectively highlighting text might be ineffective or even detrimental to learning (Dunlosky et al. 2013; Idstein and Jenkins 1972; Peterson 1992; Stordahl and Christensen 1956). One argument is that **students often do not know how to highlight effectively, so such activity primarily amounts to a mechanism for tracking progress and does not involve deeper processing** (Stordahl and Christensen 1956; Bell and Limber 2010). (Page 3) --- Students who rely on highlighters and think they are particularly effective, for example, may suffer from an **illusion of knowing or competence** (Bjork 1999, 2013; Koriat and Bjork 2005). Specifically, **such students may process highlighted material in a less meaningful way when re-reading than if that material were not highlighted. While re-reading, such students may only quickly glance over highlighted text, incorrectly assuming that because they have already highlighted that information, it is deeply encoded in memory** (Page 4) --- ### How Do Highlighting and Spacing Affect Learning? Importantly, however, **heavy highlighters did not outperform light highlighters at final test. If anything, light highlighters numerically outperformed heavy highlighters**, suggesting that the benefits of highlighting do not stem from the mere act of highlighting alone. Possibly, the **light highlighters put more cognitive effort and analysis into deciding what to highlight**, resulting in fewer highlighted words, but **deeper processing** of those words compared to words highlighted by heavy highlighters. (Page 7) --- We found that **highlighting improved later cued recall of highlighted information without impairing recall of non-highlighted information from a text passage**, a finding that is inconsistent with a von Restorff-based explanation. That is, highlighting did not seem to enjoy its benefit merely by making highlighted text stand out upon re-study. (Page 9) --- The results of the present research suggest that **highlighting**, far from being an ineffective study technique (Dunlosky et al. 2013), **can facilitate long-term retention**—particularly when students, possibly owing to limited available study time, engage in massed re-readings or study sessions. In such situations, **students could probably improve the effectiveness of their study via selective highlighting because such a practice would lead them to think about why they initially selected certain words or phrases to highlight, resulting in deeper processing during subsequent readings.** (Page 9) --- **A surprising finding of the present study is that participants who valued highlighters the most profited least from their use**. One possible reason for this finding is that **participants who were unaccustomed to highlighting put more effort into the act of highlighting**, with the ultimate result of better retention. From this perspective, highlighting could be characterized as a desirable difficulty, at least for some students, because it forces them to think about and process text differently than they typically would and in a way that ultimately leads to better memory for that text. These results also suggest that even if participants were prevented from engaging in the type of study processes they normally employ, the costs of such prevention did not outweigh the benefits of using a highlighter. (Page 9) --- **Our results also indicate that training students how to highlight effectively could help promote useful study strategies**. ... **Such training should involve encouraging students to think carefully about which sections of the text should be highlighted and to justify their choices**, as well as asking those questions again when rereading a previously highlighted section. Such questioning during highlighting and re-reading should evoke two beneficial activities for improved retention: deeper processing and retrieval ... practice, both of which have been repeatedly shown to improve retention (e.g., Craik and Lockhart 1972; Roediger and Karpicke 2006). (Page 9) --- simply the act of highlighting text is not sufficient to promote its retention. Indeed, despite the fact that highlighting a relevant portion of a text was clearly beneficial, more overall highlighting activity tended to lead to worse—not better—performance at final test. Clearly, it is not highlighting per se that is beneficial; rather, it is how highlighting changes the way students read and think about text that is beneficial. (Page 10) ---