[Terretta]

Underlining and highlighting have a mechanical failure for recall — they do not exercise the output circuits even once.

Instead, if you want to remember the thought you were about to highlight or underline, write it out long hand, and from short term memory not copying rote, in a note book.

This exercises the full path: reading, comprehension, decision you’ll need to recall, storage, retrieval, and output from mental storage back into physical world.

Plus, the notebook then provides a hook for refreshing the information geography in your storage. Reskim the notes and you refresh the larger narrative and how it hangs together. Revisit the notebook on a periodically decreasing interval, you’ll still recall the narrative decades later.

[repsak]

Just skimmed the article but underlining only seemed to be one small part of the method.

Understanding by summarizing into Anki cards and then making sure you remember it trough spaced repetition (both "output") seemed to be the most important part.

Distributed learning, practice testing and Interleaved practice all seem to have some scientific backing.

[QasimK]

What is distributed learning? Is it spaced repetition?

[repsak]

It just means distributing your learning trough time, so basically the opposite of cramming.

I guess spaced repetition can be seen as a combination of distributed learning and practice testing.

I got the terminology from here

http://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full

Here is a nice summary of the results

http://journals.sagepub.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/s...

[adamnemecek]

Highlighting works however don’t highlight as you read. Instead, once you have read a page, think about what on the page needs highlighting and highlight.