Highlighting audit and replacement

Replace passive highlighting with active annotation that requires understanding to produce.

Why it works

Highlighting and underlining feel productive because they direct attention and create visual salience. But highlighting requires only recognition of importance, not encoding — you can highlight a sentence without understanding or remembering it. The audit practice converts marking from a passive to an active task by requiring the learner to produce a marginal note in their own words, which requires processing the material at depth.

How to do it

1. Replace all highlighting with margin notes — but the note must be in your own words, not a copy.
2. For each note, require that it answers one of: "Why does this matter?", "What does this connect to?", or "What would I tell someone who didn’t know this?"
3. After a session, test yourself on only the margin notes without re-reading the underlying text.
4. If you cannot explain a note, it was not deep enough — rewrite it until it is self-explanatory.

Evidence

Dunlosky et al. (2013) rated highlighting as "low utility" for learning, noting that it is passive, does not require understanding, and is widely used precisely because it feels productive without requiring effort. Elaborative note-making is rated higher. (observational)

Annotation quality varies enormously — shallow restating of text in the margin is only marginally better than highlighting. The marginal note must require genuine generative processing.

Sources

• Dunlosky et al. (2013), "Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques," Psychological Science in the Public Interest

Common mistake

Copying a phrase from the text into the margin, which is lighter work than highlighting and feels like elaboration while requiring no more actual understanding.