The research verdict on active recall vs rereading for certification exams — why rereading feels productive, why it underperforms, and how to switch.
Short answer: active recall wins, and it is not close. Controlled research on the testing effect — notably Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 experiments in Psychological Science — found that practising retrieval from memory produced better long-term retention than spending the same time restudying the material. Rereading is not worthless, but as a primary study method for a certification exam it is one of the weakest choices you can make, and the frustrating part is that it feels like one of the strongest.
This article is a head-to-head comparison of the two methods: what each one actually does to your memory, what the evidence says, and how to convert a rereading habit into a recall habit without buying anything or changing your study materials. If you want the scheduling side of the equation — when to repeat your recall sessions over the weeks before an exam — that lives in our guide to spaced repetition for certification exams, and the craft of writing good practice cards has its own guide on making effective certification flashcards.
Rereading is exactly what it sounds like: going back over the study guide chapter, the video-course notes, the official documentation, for a second or third pass. Highlighting and re-highlighting are close cousins — they are all forms of re-exposure, where the information flows from the page into your eyes.
Active recall (researchers usually say retrieval practice) reverses the direction. You close the book and force the information to flow out of your memory instead: answering a practice question, writing down everything you remember about a topic on a blank page, explaining a concept aloud, or responding to a flashcard prompt. The defining feature is effortful retrieval without looking at the source first.
The distinction matters more than the format. A flashcard you flip over before genuinely attempting the answer is rereading in disguise. A textbook becomes a recall tool the moment you shut it and try to reconstruct the section from memory before checking.
Rereading has a seductive quality that cognitive scientists trace to fluency: the second time through a chapter, the material feels familiar, the sentences flow, nothing surprises you. Your brain interprets that ease as knowledge. But recognising a correct statement when it is in front of you and producing it under exam conditions are different abilities — and a certification exam tests the second one.
This is why so many candidates report reading a study guide "three times cover to cover" and still failing. They genuinely knew the material in the recognition sense. Sitting in the test centre, with the page absent and only a question stem to work from, the retrieval pathways they needed had never been exercised.
Rereading also hides your weak spots. Every page feels roughly equally familiar on a second pass, so nothing tells you that you could not actually reproduce the difference between two similar concepts if asked. Recall is diagnostic by nature: the moment you cannot answer, you have found a gap, precisely located, while there is still time to fix it.
Two findings anchor this comparison, and both are worth knowing by name because they generalise across subjects.
The testing effect. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) had learners either repeatedly study material or study it and then repeatedly test themselves on it. On a delayed final test — the condition that resembles an exam sat days or weeks after studying — the tested groups retained substantially more. Strikingly, the repeated-study groups often looked better in the short term and were more confident, which is exactly the trap described above: restudying inflates predicted performance while retrieval builds actual performance.
The technique rankings. Dunlosky and colleagues' 2013 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest evaluated ten common learning techniques across hundreds of studies. Practice testing came out among the highest-utility techniques; rereading and highlighting were rated low-utility. That review is the closest thing study-skills research has to a consensus document, and its verdict on this exact matchup is unambiguous.
One honest caveat: most of this research was run on students learning prose passages, vocabulary and course content, not specifically on IT professionals studying certification syllabi. But certification exams are, if anything, a friendlier environment for retrieval practice than university courses, because providers publish explicit objective lists and the exam format itself is question-answering — the very skill retrieval practice trains.
| Factor | Active recall | Rereading |
|---|---|---|
| Long-term retention | Strong — retrieval strengthens the memory trace itself (testing effect) | Weak — gains fade quickly after the session |
| Effort while studying | High; feels difficult and slow | Low; feels smooth and fast |
| Confidence accuracy | Honest — failures show you exactly what you don't know | Misleading — fluency masquerades as mastery |
| Diagnostic value | Pinpoints weak objectives question by question | Almost none; every page feels equally familiar |
| Materials needed | A blank page, self-made questions, flashcards or practice tests | The source text only |
| Best role in cert prep | Primary method from the first week onward | First-contact reading and quick pre-recall refreshers |
| Evidence rating (Dunlosky et al., 2013) | High utility (practice testing) | Low utility |
Notice the diagonal trade: the method that feels worse performs better. Difficulty during retrieval is not a sign the method is failing you — the effort is the mechanism.
A fair comparison should say what the losing method is for, because "never open the book twice" is not the lesson.
The failure mode is using re-exposure as your measure of progress — counting passes through the guide instead of counting questions answered correctly from memory.
If your current routine is read → highlight → reread, here is a direct replacement that uses the same materials.
A realistic picture of the change: a network engineer preparing for a security certification used to spend Saturday mornings rereading two chapters. Under the recall loop, the same three hours cover one chapter's brain-dump and corrections plus a 30-question self-quiz on the previous week's material. It covers fewer pages, feels harder, and produces conspicuously better practice-test scores within a few weeks — because the practice test is finally measuring something the study sessions trained.
"Recall takes too long — I'll never cover the syllabus." Coverage by rereading is an illusion of progress; you are covering pages, not retaining objectives. Retrieval is slower per page and dramatically faster per remembered fact. If your exam date is close and you genuinely must triage, cut low-weight material, not the recall step — our guide to studying with limited time covers that triage.
"I get everything wrong when I try to recall — it's demoralising." That is the method working. Errors during practice, followed by checking the answer, are part of how the testing effect operates. Wrong-then-corrected beats fluently-reread on the exam that counts.
"My exam is heavily conceptual — surely recall only suits memorised facts?" Retrieval practice applies to concepts too: explaining a mechanism from memory is recall. For deep conceptual material, pairing recall with self-explanation works well — the Feynman technique is essentially structured recall with an explanation standard attached. For raw technical detail like ports and acronyms, see memorising technical concepts.
Is rereading ever enough on its own to pass a certification exam?
Some candidates do pass that way, usually with strong prior experience doing the retrieval work for them on the job. For material that is new to you, the research pattern is clear: re-exposure alone retains poorly over the multi-week gap between studying a topic and sitting the exam.
Do practice tests count as active recall?
Yes — practice testing is the form of retrieval practice with the strongest evidence base in Dunlosky et al.'s review. Use them as a learning tool (answer, check, understand the explanation), not just a final readiness gauge, and never try to memorise specific questions and answers — the goal is retrieving the underlying objective knowledge.
How soon after reading should I attempt recall?
Attempt it in the same session — close the book and brain-dump within minutes. Then repeat after a delay of a day or more; the delayed repetitions do the heavy lifting for retention.
Does highlighting add anything to rereading?
Dunlosky and colleagues rated highlighting low-utility as well. If marking the text helps you concentrate on a first pass, it is harmless; just do not mistake a well-highlighted chapter for stored knowledge.
Choose recall, and make the choice concrete tonight: for the topic you studied most recently, close every source and write down what you actually remember. The gaps on that page are worth more than another full pass through the guide, because they are the only honest map of what the exam would catch you on. Rereading keeps its minor roles — first contact and post-failure checking — but the centre of your preparation should be questions you answer from memory, at increasing delays, in formats that converge on the exam itself.
Exam facts in this guide were checked against official certification-provider pages on . Fees, exam codes and policies change — confirm on the provider’s own site before you book.
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