A comparison of study strategies for passages: rereading, answering questions, and generating questions

Students are often encouraged to generate and answer their own questions on to-be-remembered material, because this interactive process is thought to enhance memory. But does this strategy actually work? In three experiments, all participants read the same passage, answered questions, and took a test to get accustomed to the materials in a practice phase. They then read three passages and did one of three tasks on each passage: reread the passage, answered questions set by the experimenter, or generated and answered their own questions. Passages were 575-word (Experiments 1 and 2) or 350-word (Experiment 3) texts on topics such as Venice, the Taj Mahal, and the singer Cesaria Evora. After each task, participants predicted their performance on a later test, which followed the same format as the practice phase test (a short-answer test in Experiments 1 and 2, and a free recall test in Experiment 3). In all experiments, best performance was predicted after generating and answering questions. We show, however, that generating questions led to no improvement over answering comprehension questions, but that both of these tasks were more beneficial than rereading. This was the case on an immediate short-answer test (Experiment 1), a short-answer test taken 2 days after study (Experiment 2), and an immediate free recall test (Experiment 3). Generating questions took at least twice as long as answering questions in all three experiments, so although it is a viable alternative to answering questions in the absence of materials, it is less time-efficient.