You buy a fresh set of highlighters every exam season. Your 10-year-old comes back from a revision session with half a chapter glowing yellow, and it looks like serious work got done. Scores come back the same as last time anyway, and it's hard to tell if the problem is effort or something about the method itself.
What a large review of study techniques actually found
John Dunlosky, Katherine Rawson, Elizabeth Marsh, Mitchell Nathan, and Daniel Willingham reviewed the evidence behind ten common study techniques for Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2013. They rated highlighting and underlining "low utility" — among the least effective techniques they examined, despite being some of the most commonly used by students of all ages. The two techniques that earned the highest rating were almost the opposite of highlighting: practice testing (quizzing yourself, using flashcards, answering questions without looking) and distributed practice (spreading study sessions across several days instead of one long sitting).
Why colouring a page feels like progress anyway
Highlighting creates a real sense of having engaged with the material — the page looks different, you made decisions about what mattered, time passed. What it doesn't reliably do is force the brain to retrieve anything later without the page in front of it, which is the part that actually builds memory. Practice testing works precisely because it's uncomfortable: pulling an answer out of memory with nothing to look at is harder than recognising a highlighted phrase, and that difficulty is what makes it stick.
Where this doesn't mean throw the highlighters out
Dunlosky and colleagues' review drew mainly on research with older students, not a specific study of Indian primary or middle schoolers, so the exact numbers may not transfer perfectly to a CBSE classroom. The underlying mechanism — that actively recalling information beats passively reviewing it — is well replicated across ages and subjects, which is why it's reasonable guidance even without a child-specific number. Highlighting isn't actively harmful either; it's just a weak finishing move on its own. Used as a first pass to flag what to turn into questions afterward, it still has a role — the problem is stopping there.
What this means this week
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After reading a section, close the book and say out loud what was in it. Three things remembered without looking beats a whole page remembered while looking.
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Turn chapter headings into questions before reading, then answer them from memory afterward. This is practice testing without needing a worksheet.
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Split one long revision evening into two or three shorter ones across the week. Spacing it out matters more than how many hours go in on any single night.
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Let highlighting be step one, not the finish line. If a passage gets marked, turn it into a question to answer later — don't just reread the colour.
Sources
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. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
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