Review the whole chapter after you finish

Do a final pass over all your notes and heading-questions before you close the book.

Why it works

A review session immediately after reading acts as a brief spaced repetition: the material is first encountered in sections, then reactivated minutes later as a whole — two exposures with a short delay, which is the earliest point on a spaced-repetition curve. The review also helps you see relationships between sections that weren’t visible inside each section.

How to do it

1. After finishing all sections of a chapter, return to your list of heading-questions.
2. Answer each one briefly without re-reading the section.
3. For questions you still can’t answer, mark them for a later review rather than re-reading immediately.
4. Spend 5–10 minutes maximum; the value is reactivation, not re-studying.

Evidence

Even a short review session shortly after initial study creates an early spacing gap that improves later retention compared to studying once without review. This is consistent with the spacing effect. (mechanistic)

The specific review step in SQ3R has not been isolated from the other steps; its benefit is inferred from the general spacing-effect literature rather than directly measured.

Sources

• Ebbinghaus (1885/1913), memory and forgetting curves

Common mistake

Skipping the review when you feel the material is "fresh" — that fluency is exactly the illusion the review is designed to test, and it evaporates faster than it feels.