Students review textbooks to prepare for tests but how good is re-reading as a study strategy? Studies show that re-reading improves recall in the short term but that retrieval is a better strategy for longer delays, presumably because it is closer to the target behavior (i.e., remembering during a test). However, the re-reading that students are asked to do in typical investigations, e.g., view a word pair or read a fact to be recalled later, likely differs from what students do when they re-read to study for a test. In this study, we tested whether re-reading similar chapter sections from two textbooks would be superior to reading the same section from a single textbook twice. We chose neuroscience sections in two introductory psychology texts. Students enrolled in General Psychology courses at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, CA (N = 172; 69% female, 30% male, 0.5% non-binary; M = 19.6 years) were randomly assigned to either read the same textbook material twice in succession (n = 43), read the corresponding sections from each of the two textbooks in succession (n = 44), or read only one textbook’s section once (n = 39). A control condition did not have assigned reading material (n = 46). We hypothesized that participants who read two different chapters would remember that information better at test, possibly due to greater engagement with the material in the second reading. Univariate ANOVA showed an overall effect of reading condition on test performance, F(3, 168) = 3.259, p = .023, ηp2 = .055. Post hoc Tukey HSD tests showed that participants who read chapters from different texts scored significantly higher than those who did not do any reading (M = 70.1%, SD = 16.5% M = 58.6%, SD = 22.3% respectively), p = .039. In contrast, there were no significant differences among any of the other conditions. We expected that students reading material from two different textbooks would not only recall more material but that this effect would be due to greater engagement with the material, reflected in more time spent reading. Comparing the three reading conditions, we found a significant difference in overall reading times, F(2, 123) = 8.033, p = .001, ηp2 = .116. However, there was no difference in time spent reading when students read the same chapter twice (M = 23.84 min, SD = 11.1 min) or read different chapters (M = 22.34 min, SD = 10.9 min), suggesting that the benefit in test performance for the students who read the two different chapters was not related to additional time spent studying. Reading twice did take longer than reading one chapter once (M = 15.72 min, SD = 5.8) indicating that students followed the instructions, spending more time with the content, when asked to read a second time. Students often re-read their notes or the text even though retrieval is a superior strategy for long term learning. Our results show that re-reading can be beneficial if the learning episodes involve reading similar but differently framed content. Extrapolating from our findings, a useful recommendation to students might be to alternate between reviewing their notes and re-reading the text when studying. Additional work should continue to focus on determining what effect reading the same text twice versus two similar texts has on remembering. If our conjecture is accurate, then perhaps providing different versions of a narrative will improve long-term remembering.

Keywords: Undergraduates, education, learning and remembering.