How to Study

If rereading is largely ineffective, why do students favor it? …Rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery… Students work hard to capture the precise wording of phrases they hear in class lectures, laboring under the misapprehension that the essence of the subject lies in the syntax in which it’s described. Mastering the lecture or the text is not the same as mastering the ideas behind them.”
— Brown, Roedinger, and McDaniel in ~Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning~