It is the most popular study method in the country and one of the least effective. Here is what the evidence says to do instead.
Your child is at the desk. The notes are open. They've been at it for an hour and they look like they're working.
They're reading the page, then reading it again. Maybe with a highlighter.
It feels like studying. It's the most popular study method in Australia. And it's close to the worst one available.
Roediger and Karpicke ran the experiment that settled this in 2006.
Students studied a passage. One group reread it. Another group put it away and tried to recall it from memory.
A week later, the recall group remembered 61% of it. The rereading group remembered 40%.
Same material. Same time. A 21 point gap, from one change in method.
And it isn't a one off. Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) reviewed 10 common study techniques and rated each on how well the evidence supported it. Practice testing and spreading study out came top. Rereading and highlighting, the two things almost every student actually does, came bottom.
Here's the cruel part. Rereading feels better than recall.
The second time your child reads a page, it's familiar. It flows. Nothing snags. Their brain reads that fluency as "I know this".
They don't. They recognise it. Recognition and recall are different things, and only one of them is available in an exam.
Researchers call this the illusion of competence, and the evidence is that students genuinely believe rereading works better. They predict the opposite of what happens.
So when your child says they've studied and then bombs the test, they usually aren't lying to you. They were fooled by their own brain, the same way everyone is.
Close the book and write down everything you remember.
That's it. That's the whole technique. It's called free recall, and it's the thing that produced the 61%.
It will feel awful. Your child will remember less than they expected and feel like they've gone backwards. That feeling is the method working. The struggle to pull something out of memory is what strengthens it.
Then check what they missed, and only reread that.
Brain dump. Close everything. Blank page. Write down all you can remember about the topic. Then compare it with the notes and see what's missing. 10 minutes.
Ask questions, don't reread answers. Turn every heading into a question. Cover the answer. Say it out loud before you look.
Spread it out. 4 sessions of 25 minutes across a fortnight beats one 100 minute session the night before, comfortably. Same total time. The forgetting between sessions is doing the work, which is why cramming feels efficient and isn't.
If your child has left it to the night before, rereading is genuinely their best remaining option, because there's no time for anything else to work.
Which is the whole argument for not leaving it to the night before.
The techniques above need days. That's not a moral point about discipline. It's just how memory works.
You can do the brain dump with them without knowing any of the content.
Ask them to tell you about the topic with the book closed. You don't need to understand the answer. You'll both hear immediately where it gets thin.
Then say: "go and look up that bit."
That's the entire intervention, and it works whether or not you can remember Year 9 science.
This is a big part of why it's built the way it is.
Because it asks your child to think first and answer before it explains, every session is retrieval practice by design rather than by discipline. Your child isn't reading an explanation. They're being asked to produce one.
Challenge Mode does the same thing with mock exams and auto scoring, which is free recall under something close to test conditions.
You can start a free trial tonight, and it works out where the thin bits are.
SubjectMate asks your child what they know first, then guides them to the answer. Built by a teacher, available every school night.
See how it works →