How You Study
Which learning techniques you actually use, against the ones with the best evidence behind them.
- Questions
- 13
- 4 min
- Technique use, not learning style
What this is
This is deliberately not a learning-styles test. The visual / auditory / reading / kinaesthetic model asks you to accept that instruction matched to your style improves learning, and the major reviews — Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer and Bjork; Coffield and colleagues — found no adequate evidence for that, while several of the questionnaires failed basic reliability checks. What is left is what you do rather than what you are. The six techniques below are named from Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham's 2013 review, which rated distributed practice and retrieval practice as high utility and rereading, highlighting and summarising as low, with interleaving added from Rohrer and Pashler's work. The techniques are theirs; the questions are ours, and nothing here is scored.
Where it comes from
written down, not impliedTechnique use, not learning style
The six techniques, and how well each works, come from the review by Dunlosky and colleagues (2013), with Rohrer and Pashler on interleaving. The techniques are plain behaviours, so the questions simply ask how often you use each.
Written for this app
- Reliability
- not measured
- Factor structure
- not measured
- Validity
- not measured
Further reading
- Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology (opens in a new tab). Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58original source
- Rohrer, D., & Pashler, H. (2010). Recent research on human learning challenges conventional instructional strategies (opens in a new tab). Educational Researcher, 39(5), 406–412original source
- Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence (opens in a new tab). Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119critique
- Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E., & Ecclestone, K. (2004). Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: A systematic and critical review (opens in a new tab). Learning and Skills Research Centre, Londoncritique
Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.
Why these questions carry no evidence
Every questionnaire in this app writes its own items, because the framework behind an instrument is usually public while the published questionnaire is copyrighted. That is the honest way to build it and it has a cost worth stating plainly: reliability and validity belong to a specific set of questions given to a specific group of people, not to the name of the idea behind them. These questions have never been given to a sample, have no norms, and have no evidence that they measure what they are named after.