How to Use Annotation and Highlighting Effectively in Certification Study

What is this page about?

An examination of whether highlighting helps certification study, drawing on Dunlosky et al.'s research that rated highlighting a low-utility technique because it requires only recognition, not retrieval. The guide reframes highlighting as an organizational tool rather than a learning event, and shows how pairing it with annotation, brief marginal notes on why something matters or how it connects, makes text-marking genuinely useful. It covers margin-summary, question, and connection annotation methods, digital tools, and a 10% marking rule.

What has been corrected on this page?

Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.

1. 10 July 2026 · corrected by Emir Baycan

   The article attributed a polished direct quote to Dr. John Dunlosky about highlighting's low utility. Dunlosky's 2013 review (Psychological Science in the Public Interest) is real and does rate highlighting as low-utility, and he is genuinely at Kent State -- but this exact quote is not a verbatim excerpt from the paper, it reads as a synthesized paraphrase presented as a direct quotation. Converted to properly-attributed paraphrase since the underlying finding is accurate; added the correct journal name.

   Before

   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

   After

   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.

   Why: 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.

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