Active recall: what it is and how to use it on your reading

Active recall is a way of learning where you bring information back from memory instead of reading it again. You close the book or the article, try to remember what it said, and then check what you got right. Each attempt makes the memory stronger and shows you what you missed. Psychologists call this the testing effect, or retrieval practice.

The guides that rank for active recall are written for students with exams coming up. This post covers the same research and then shows how to use active recall on the articles, essays and books you read for yourself, where nobody is going to test you.

What active recall means

There are two ways to know something you read. You can recognize it, which means it feels familiar when you see it again. Or you can recall it, which means you can say what it was with the page closed. Rereading only practices recognizing. Active recall practices recalling, and recalling is what you need when you want to use an idea in a conversation, a decision or your own work.

Say you read an article on how to make cold brew coffee. A week later you open it again and every step looks familiar. Now close it and try to say how much coffee goes into a liter of water and how many hours it steeps. If you can't, you recognized the article but couldn't recall it. Trying to answer that question, before you look, is active recall.

What the research says about active recall

In 2013 a team led by John Dunlosky reviewed ten common study techniques. They gave the top rating to two of them: practice testing, which is active recall, and spreading practice out over time. Rereading and highlighting were rated low.

Several studies used reading passages, which makes them a close match for the articles you read:

• In a 2006 study by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, students read a short prose passage. The ones who read it once and then wrote down what they could remember, three times, recalled 61% of it a week later. The ones who reread it recalled 40%.
• In two studies by Karpicke and Janell Blunt in 2011, 200 students read science texts. One group studied by drawing concept maps of the ideas. The other read the text, put it away and wrote down what they could recall. A week later the recall group scored about 50% higher, including on questions that asked them to connect ideas the text never stated outright. Most of the students had expected concept maps to work better.
• In experiments by Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork in 2009, people who tried to answer a question and got it wrong learned the answer better than people who were simply shown the question and answer together.

That last finding matters for everyday reading: you don't need to get the answers right. The attempt itself does the work, as long as you see the right answer afterward.

How to use active recall on an article: 3 steps

1. Ask yourself a question before you read

Look at the title and the headings, and try to answer the question the article sets out to answer. You'll mostly guess wrong, and that's fine. In a 2009 study by Lindsey Richland, Nate Kornell and Liche Kao, people answered questions about a two-page text before reading it. A week later they remembered 55% of those facts. People who used that time to keep reading remembered 45%. The comparison only counted questions the first group had answered wrong before reading.

2. Close it and write down what you remember

When you finish, close the article and write down, or say out loud, what you remember. Aim for the main claim, the reasons behind it and one example. A blank page is enough, and two minutes is enough. Students call this blurting.

3. Check what you missed

Open the article again and compare. Read the parts you missed or got wrong, now that you know what you're looking for. Then turn the two or three ideas you want to keep into questions you'll answer again later.

How to write good questions

A good question makes recall easy to do and easy to check.

• Ask for one clear answer. "How many hours does cold brew steep?" works. "What did the article say about cold brew?" is too loose to check.
• Make yourself produce the answer. With multiple choice you can pick the right option because it looks familiar, and that's recognizing again.
• Ask why and how as well as what. "Why does a wrong answer on a pretest still help?" makes you rebuild the reasoning, while "What did Richland's study find?" only asks for the result.
• Keep each question small. If the answer needs a paragraph, split it into two questions.

Active recall and spaced repetition

One round of active recall right after reading helps, but the memory still fades. Doing it again after a few days, and again a week or a month later, keeps it longer. A 2006 review of 317 experiments by Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues found that reviews spread over time beat reviews crammed together.

Spaced repetition apps work out those gaps for you. A card you remember waits longer before it comes back, and a card you forget comes back soon. There's a simple schedule you can follow by hand in how to remember what you read.

Other ways to do active recall

• Flashcards, with a question on one side and the answer on the other.
• Explaining the article to a friend over dinner without looking anything up. If you get stuck, you've found the part to reread. This is sometimes called the Feynman technique.
• Guessing before you search. When you half remember something you read, try to recall it first and look it up after.
• Practice questions, if you're reading for a course or a certification that has them.
• Walking a memory palace for anything you need in order. You picture a route through a place you know and name the item waiting at each stop.

Apps for active recall

Anki is a free flashcard app for computers and Android, and its iPhone app is paid. You write the cards yourself, and Anki schedules your reviews. Since 2023 you can switch Anki to a newer scheduler called FSRS. Quizlet and RemNote are other flashcard apps.

I made Bundle for the reading part. Writing questions after every article takes time, so Bundle does that step for you. When you finish an article, a Quick check asks you a few questions about it, and you keep the good ones as cards. Bundle schedules the cards with FSRS and sends one reminder a day with the ones that are due.

QUICK CHECK · SCIENCE Which night of sleep matters most after you study? The night after. It is at least as important as the night before, because that sleep cements what you learned. Sleep On It: How Snoozing Strengthens MemoriesShow in article

SkipKeep card

Bundle is on the App Store for iPhone, and you can try it free for 14 days.

Questions about active recall

How long does active recall take to work?

One attempt already helps. In the studies above, the difference showed up on a test a week later. To keep something for months, repeat the recall a few times over spaced-out days.

Is summarizing the same as active recall?

Only when you write the summary with the source closed. Summarizing with the article open is mostly copying, and Dunlosky's review rated summarizing as low utility.

Does active recall work if I get the answers wrong?

Yes, as long as you check the right answer afterward. Kornell, Hays and Bjork found that a wrong guess followed by the answer beat reading the answer alone.