How to Use Annotation and Highlighting Effectively in Certification Study
Move beyond passive highlighting with annotation techniques that force active processing: margin summaries, connection notes, question annotations, and the...
The exact change
Research by Dunlosky et al. (2013) categorizes highlighting and underlining as low utility strategies: "Highlighting and underlining are among the most popular study strategies but among the least effective for improving long-term retention. They require minimal cognitive effort, do not produce the generative processing needed for durable encoding, and create an illusion of learning through familiarity that does not translate to retrievability." -- Dr. John Dunlosky, Department of Psychology, Kent State University
Dunlosky et al. (2013), in a widely cited review published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, categorized highlighting and underlining as low utility strategies among the ten learning techniques they evaluated. Their review found that despite being among the most popular study strategies, highlighting and underlining did not reliably improve learning across the studies they examined, and in some cases were associated with worse performance on tasks requiring inference rather than simple fact retrieval. The techniques require minimal cognitive effort and do not produce the generative processing that supports durable encoding, which helps explain why they create a sense of familiarity with the material without translating into genuine retrievability.
Suggested change
BEFORE: blockquote presented as a direct Dunlosky quote, no journal named. AFTER: prose citing Dunlosky et al. (2013), Psychological Science in the Public Interest, describing the actual finding (highlighting didn't reliably improve learning, sometimes hurt inference-based tasks) without the fabricated verbatim quote marks.
Why this is better
Applied the fix described in this contribution's suggested_change: converted the unverified verbatim Dunlosky blockquote (not an actual excerpt from the 2013 paper, presented as a direct quotation) into properly attributed paraphrase citing Dunlosky et al. (2013), Psychological Science in the Public Interest, describing the real finding (highlighting is low-utility and can hurt inference-based tasks) without the unverified quotation marks. The article's own reference list already correctly named the journal, so the fix aligns the body text with that reference. Verified via re-fetch of live post id 802 (annotation-highlighting-study-techniques) that the unverified blockquote is gone and HTML tags remain balanced.