Why does “asking” help more than simply “reviewing”?

Glaucio Aranha *

In many classrooms, the practice of “reviewing” before an assessment usually appears as a kind of return to the content: the teacher revisits the explanation, the student rereads the material, the class returns to the board, the slide, or the summary, expecting that familiarity with the subject will produce learning. There is, indeed, pedagogical value in returning to themes already worked on, especially when the teacher reorganizes the content, making relationships explicit, correcting misunderstandings, and expanding the examples. However, in recent decades, research in cognitive psychology and education has been showing that one of the most productive ways to strengthen memory involves a simple, old, and everyday action: asking the student to try to “remember” the subject.

What happens is that, when someone searches for information in their own memory, formulating an answer, reconstructing an explanation, completing an idea, or solving a question without immediately consulting the material, the brain ends up performing a more demanding activity than pure and simple rereading. It reorganizes cues, establishes relationships, fills in gaps and, ultimately, develops its own associative pathways that help consolidate what has been learned. This phenomenon is known in the international literature as retrieval practice, and having been studied in different contexts, age groups, and fields of knowledge. The study Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention, developed by Roediger and Karpicke (2006), helps us understand this phenomenon.

At first glance, the idea seems counterintuitive, since many students feel that they have learned better when they have reread a text several times, underlined a page, or recognized an explanation they had already seen. This feeling of familiarity, however, can be misleading, because recognizing something before one’s eyes demands less from memory than reconstructing an answer without immediate support. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) showed that memory tests, when used as an opportunity for learning, favored long-term retention more than situations centered only on repeated study, indicating that answering, remembering, and trying to retrieve information can actively participate in the consolidation of learning. In a later review, Dunlosky and collaborators (2013) analyzed different study techniques, including rereading, highlighting, summarizing, self-explanation, distributed practice, and practice testing, concluding that practice testing and distributed study have high utility for learning, especially because they are relatively simple, adaptable, and applicable strategies in diverse school contexts.

For the teacher, the practical consequence of this discussion is relevant because it changes the pedagogical place of the question. The question, which was previously concentrated on the instrumentalization of final verification, used to discover who “knows” and who “does not know,” begins to turn toward participation in the learning process itself. Thus, a question asked at the beginning of the class, for example, may reactivate knowledge from a previous class; a brief question in the middle of the explanation may help the class reorganize what it has just heard; a short memory-writing activity at the end of the class may reveal which ideas became more available and which still require mediation. Instead of reserving the question for the test, the teacher can distribute it throughout the process, treating it as a form of guided study, in which remembering, making mistakes, reviewing, and trying again are part of the construction of knowledge.

A simple example helps visualize this principle. After a class on the nervous system, instead of merely asking students to reread the chapter on neurons and synapses, the teacher could begin the next class with three brief questions: “What is the general function of a neuron?”, “What happens at a synapse?”, and “Why does communication between neurons depend on electrical and chemical signals?”. The answers could be written individually, in two or three minutes, without consultation. Then, students would compare their answers with a classmate and, afterward, with a collectively constructed synthesis. In this small procedure, the most important thing is not to assign an assessment grade, but rather to create a situation in which memory is called upon to work actively. When the student realizes that they do not remember a part, this gap also begins to have pedagogical value, since it guides later study and makes the teacher’s feedback more meaningful.

This point is especially important because active retrieval depends on a safe environment. In a pedagogical sense, “asking” in order to learn requires another climate: low-threat questions, time to think, the possibility of drafting, specific feedback, and the opportunity for correction. Short ungraded quizzes, response cards, anonymous questions, individual memory records, and pair discussions can be useful precisely because they reduce the emotional weight of the situation and broaden participation. The literature applied to the classroom has indicated that retrieval practices tend to favor learning at different educational levels, in different subjects and formats, especially when accompanied by feedback and when distributed over time (Agarwal et al., 2021).

There is also an important relationship between active retrieval and spacing. Reviewing everything on the eve of a test may produce a feeling of immediate mastery, yet school learning needs to survive over time, crossing weeks, months, and new uses of knowledge, which Reuven Feuerstein (Feuerstein et al., 2014) calls “transcendence” in the learning process. When the teacher revisits a concept at planned intervals, asking short questions about content already worked on, they help students reencounter memory pathways that could have weakened, strengthening them. A science class, for example, may begin with a question from the previous class, a question from the previous week, and a question from a unit already completed. This spaced return does not need to take up much time; five well-planned minutes at the beginning of class may have great value when they make the student search for an explanation, justify an answer, or apply an idea in a new situation.

It is also worth observing that active retrieval is not limited to closed questions. It may appear in drawing activities, maps made from memory, oral explanations, problem-solving, written syntheses, comparison between examples, the creation of questions by the students themselves, and small application challenges. In a study published in the journal Science, Karpicke and Blunt (2011) observed that activities based on retrieving and reconstructing knowledge produced important gains in meaningful learning, including in tasks that required understanding, indicating that “remembering” may involve conceptual elaboration, provided that the student is led to reorganize ideas and relationships. For the school, this suggests that good questions do not involve only the repetition of words, since they may invite the student to explain causes, establish relationships, justify choices, and recognize the limits of their own understanding.

In teaching practice, one possible routine would be relatively simple. At the beginning of class, the teacher proposes two or three review questions, allowing students to answer without consulting their notebooks. During the exposition, the teacher includes short pauses, asking the class to write, in one sentence, the central idea of the passage discussed. At the end, the teacher asks for a short synthesis, perhaps answering the question: “What can I explain now that was confusing before?”. In the following class, some of these answers return as a starting point. This cycle, when regularly incorporated, helps bring assessment and learning closer together, because the teacher is able to see more clearly what the class is understanding, while students learn to monitor their own memory with greater precision.

For teachers, perhaps one of the most useful contributions of cognitive neuroscience and the psychology of learning lies precisely in this change of pedagogical sensitivity. Learning involves exposure to content, mediation, language, bonds, study, practice, and time, certainly, yet it also involves moments in which the student needs to encounter what they have already begun to know. The question, in this sense, can be understood as a simple pedagogical technology, low-cost and cognitively dense. When well used, it helps memory work, allows error to appear, although resignified. It therefore ceases to have the value of “failure,” coming to mean “reviewed information.” This favors the return to knowledge, creating a study culture in which remembering becomes part of the everyday life of the classroom.

References

AGARWAL, Pooja K.; BAIN, Patrice M.; CHAMBERLAIN, Roger W. The value of applied research: retrieval practice improves classroom learning and recommendations from a teacher, a principal, and a scientist. Educational Psychology Review, v. 24, n. 3, p. 437-448, 2012. DOI: 10.1007/s10648-012-9210-2.

AGARWAL, Pooja K.; NUNES, Ludmila D.; BLUNT, Janell R. Retrieval practice consistently benefits student learning: a systematic review of applied research in schools and classrooms. Educational Psychology Review, v. 33, p. 1409-1453, 2021. DOI: 10.1007/s10648-021-09595-9.

DUNLOSKY, John et al. Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, v. 14, n. 1, p. 4-58, 2013. DOI: 10.1177/1529100612453266.

FEUERSTEIN, Reuven; FEUERSTEIN, Refael S.; FALIK, Louis H. Além da inteligência: aprendizagem mediada e a capacidade de mudança do cérebro. Translated by Aline Kaehler. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2014.

KARPICKE, Jeffrey D.; BLUNT, Janell R. Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, v. 331, n. 6015, p. 772-775, 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1199327.

ROEDIGER III, Henry L.; KARPICKE, Jeffrey D. Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, v. 17, n. 3, p. 249-255, 2006. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x.

* Glaucio Aranha – He is an Adjunct Professor at the NUTES Institute of Education in Sciences and Health (NUTES), at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), working at the Educational Video Laboratory (LVE). Extension Coordinator (NUTES/UFRJ). Vice-Coordinator of Undergraduate Studies (NUTES/UFRJ). He holds a degree in Law from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), a master’s degree in Communication, Image and Information (area: New Communication and Information Technologies), and a PhD in Letters (area: Comparative Literature), both from Fluminense Federal University (UFF); Specialist in Integrated Communication Management (UNILEYA). He works as lead researcher of the research group Cognition, Language and Audiovisual in Semiotic Systems (CLASS). He is co-leader, in partnership with Prof. Dr. Alfred Sholl-Franco (IBCCF/UFRJ), of the research group Neuroeduc – Center for Studies in Neurosciences and Education. He is an associate researcher in the program Sciences and Cognition – Center for Scientific Dissemination and Neuroscience Teaching, at UFRJ (CeC-NuDCEN/IBCCF/UFRJ), where he develops studies on semiotics and neuroeducation. He worked at the Judicial Administration School (DIEPE/ESAJ), of the Court of Justice of Rio de Janeiro (2001 to 2020). He has experience in the areas of media studies, semiotics, mass aesthetics, literary theory, and scientific dissemination. Member of the scientific association Organization Sciences and Cognition (OCC), the Brazilian Association of Linguistics (ABRALIN), the Brazilian Association of Medical Education (ABEM), and the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA). Research interests: 1) Telehealth, video simulation, and audiovisual mediations in care and health education; 2) Philosophy of Education and technological representations in science and health education; 3) Technoscientific imaginaries and meaning-making in education and public communication in health. Lattes CV: http://lattes.cnpq.br/1047823602449101. Personal website: www.glaucioaranha.com.

NOTE: This text was originally published in the RedeNeuro section of the Ciências e Cognição portal, under the title “Por que ‘perguntar’ ajuda mais do que apenas ‘revisar’?”, as part of its science communication initiatives aimed at connecting neuroscience, education, and teaching practices. (CIÊNCIAS E COGNIÇÃO. Por que ‘perguntar’ ajuda mais do que apenas ‘revisar’? Portal Ciências e Cognição, Caderno RedeNeuro. Disponível em: https://cienciasecognicao.org/redeneuro20260602/. Acesso em: 5 jun. 2026.)