Researchers' and educators' enthusiasm in applying cognitive principles to enhance educational practices has become more evident. Several published reviews have suggested that some potent strategies can help students learn more efficaciously. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, students do not report frequent reliance on these empirically supported techniques. In the present review, we take a novel approach, identifying study strategies for which students have strong preferences and assessing whether these preferred strategies have any merit given existing empirical evidence from the cognitive and educational literatures. Furthermore, we provide concrete recommendations for students, instructors, and psychologists. For students, we identify common pitfalls and tips for optimal implementation for each study strategy. For instructors, we provide recommendations for how they can assist students to more optimally implement these study strategies. For psychologists, we highlight promising avenues of research to help augment these study strategies.

Recently, the testing effect has received a great deal of attention from researchers and educators who are intrigued by its potential to enhance student learning in the classroom. However, effective incorporation of testing (as a learning tool) merits a close examination of the conditions under which testing can enhance student learning in an authentic classroom setting, where a number of factors may deviate from the laboratory. Based on existing evidence, we highlight several studies that encompass a few of the complexities of using testing to enhance course performance, including situations in which quizzing is beneficial for summative test performance, contexts in which quizzing does not appear to be as beneficial, and instances in which quizzing may actually hamper final test performance.

Previous research has shown that the Read-Recite-Review (3R) technique, a retrieval-based strategy, enhances free recall but not inference performance relative to a common note-taking strategy. We hypothesize that this may be because retrieval practice enhances memory processes without encouraging learners to build a coherent situation model, a type of processing necessary for successful inference performance. In 2 experiments, we attempted to enhance situation-model processing during restudy by incorporating judgments of inferencing (JOIs) within the 3R technique. In Experiment 1, participants studied a technical passage on brakes (or pumps) under 1 of 3 study conditions: a) standard 3R, b) 3R plus metacomprehension judgments, or c) note-taking plus metacomprehension judgments. The combination of retrieval practice and metacomprehension judgments (i.e., 3R plus metacomprehension) improved inference performance relative to the standard 3R and note-taking plus metacomprehension judgments conditions. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the type of metacomprehension judgments (JOIs vs. judgments of learning) and test-expectancy (TE) instructions. Our results indicated that only the addition of JOIs to the 3R strategy enhanced inference and problem-solving performance relative to the standard 3R condition. These findings suggest that making metacomprehension judgments may not be a neutral event; instead, making JOIs in concert with retrieval practice can influence people's subsequent study behavior, which in turn can have a positive impact on inference performance.

List composition effects refer to the findings in which a given memory phenomenon shows discrepant patterns across different list designs (i.e., mixed or pure lists). These effects have typically been reported with verbal materials (e.g., word lists, paired associates, sentences); much less research has examined whether these effects generalize to pictorial materials. In 3 experiments, we investigated whether list composition effects extend to the picture complexity effect, the finding that complex pictures are sometimes better recalled than simple pictures. Our results consistently indicated superior recall for complex pictures relative to simple pictures in mixed but not pure lists. We also examined 3 prominent theoretical accounts that have been proposed to explain list composition effects with verbal materials: (a) the item-order framework (Experiment 1), (b) the retrieval distinctiveness hypothesis (Experiment 2), and (c) the attention-borrowing theory (Experiment 3). Our findings indicated that the attention-borrowing theory is a viable candidate explanation for list composition effects with pictorial materials.

Structure building describes the process by which people mentally organize information while reading in order to comprehend and later recall text. We investigated how individual differences in structure building ability affect students' learning of complex, educational texts. College students studied a complex text with a mechanical theme, engaged in retrieval practice, made metamemory judgments, and then were given another study opportunity. Following a short delay, memory and comprehension of the text were assessed with a range of dependent measures, including performance on free recall, multiple-choice questions, and problem-solving questions. Participants with high structure building ability outperformed those with low structure building ability on information recalled, factual and inference multiple-choice questions, and problem solving questions. Although high and low structure builders demonstrated equivalent metamemory accuracy, high structure builders appear to better regulate their restudy time according to a discrepancy reduction strategy, which allowed them to acquire more new information that they were unable to retrieve initially during recitation. Our findings suggest that low structure builders may suffer from deficiencies at many levels of text representations as well as deficiencies in metacognitive control during restudy. Our study highlights structure building ability as an important individual difference for learning educational texts and furthers our understanding of exactly what aspects of learning are related to these differences.