The Highlighter Artist
Highlighting and summaries: how to study better without giving up the pretty notebook
Your material is organized and you start studying without dithering, which is already an edge. The weak spot is that underlining and summarizing by copying demand little mental effort, and research suggests they rank among the low-utility techniques (Dunlosky et al., 2013).
You won't throw the notebook away. You'll make each pretty page carry questions, so the summary becomes the starting point for practice, not the finish line.
Take the quizAction plan
Today: set a cap of five passages per page
Take the next chapter and allow yourself at most five highlighted passages per page. The cap forces you to decide what's central, and deciding is already mental work, which free highlighting skips. If everything is yellow, nothing is highlighted.
Write one question beside each passage
Next to each highlighted passage, jot a question it answers in the margin. Instead of underlining "mitochondria produce ATP", write "where does the cell make most of its ATP?". Each question takes 20 to 30 seconds and turns the page into a small exercise sheet.
Cap the beautifying time at 10 minutes
Start a 10-minute timer for colors, headings and sticky notes, and when it rings, stop. If the page isn't how you wanted it, that's fine: it's good enough to study from. The rest of the block, say 35 of 45 minutes, is for using the material.
The next day: cover the passage and answer
Cover the marked parts with a sheet and answer the margin questions, aloud or on a separate sheet. When you miss one, mark it with a dot. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) suggest that trying to recall fixes more than revisiting the same text, and your notebook is already set up for it.
Wednesday and Friday: only the dotted questions
On the next two days, go back only to the questions you missed, 15 minutes each. Spreading these reviews over different days tends to pay off more than doing it all at once (Cepeda et al., 2006). By the end of the week the pretty notebook has become a question bank you can shuffle before the exam.
Common pitfalls
A summary that's just a copy in new handwriting
If you summarize while looking at the text, your hand works and your head rests. Try summarizing from memory first and only then check.
Using the questions just for rereading
Reading the question and answer together is just formatted rereading. The answer stays covered until you try.
Spending Sunday reorganizing everything
Recopying the whole notebook gives a pleasant feeling of progress, but it's the same content in fresh handwriting. If you want to redo a page, pick the one whose questions you missed most, and only that one. The rest stays as it is.
Frequently asked questions
Not useless, it just pays little when it's your only technique. As a first step toward choosing what to ask, it works well.