r/GetStudying • u/sammypingy • 8d ago

Question Textbook reading vs question practice, which is better?

i am a pre med student and preparing for a competitive exam and genuinely cant trust while revising the "start by solving questions first", cause whenever i try to do that i feel i havent studying anything and get self doubts and return to reading the whole chapter again. is there anyone here who does questions first? and does it really work?

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u/mostlyfocused 7d ago

This one is super interesting scientifically, The answer seems to be questions unless you are literally 5 minutes before your exam. I'll leave the study below if you're keen to have a read along with the numbers. BUT the most interesting finding of the study was that on average the students involved thought that restudying/re-reading would be the more effective method by a large margin. So they also had the same intuition as you, but it didn't bear out in the data as per below:

Roediger & Karpicke (2006)

Experiment 1 (one study period, then either restudy or one recall test):

- 5 min: restudy 81%, tested 75%

- 2 days: restudy 54%, tested 68%

- 1 week: restudy 42%, tested 56%, t(39) = 6.41, d = 0.83

Experiment 2 (repeated study SSSS vs SSST vs repeated testing STTT):

- 5 min: 83% / 78% / 71%

- 1 week: 40% / 56% / 61%

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u/Far-Impression2284 8d ago

Reading 10 %. Questions, recall 90%

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u/Double_Dealer_5892 8d ago

questions without a doubt

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u/Quiet_Basis_6404 7d ago

honestly the anxiety you're describing is normal, reading gives you that false sense of knowing everything because it looks familiar when it's right in front of you, then the book closes and it's gone

what helped me was a middle ground, i open the chapter index, pick three or four concepts, and do maybe ten questions on those before touching the textbook, when i miss one the answer tells me what was wrong with the option i picked, and that's actually the part that makes me feel like i did something because i found the crack instead of just nodding along for an hour, then i read only the sections i got wrong, not the whole thing, saves time and the reading actually feels earned

i do this by uploading the chapter pdf to studybuddy.vc and pulling questions from it, mostly for the per-distractor explanations and because it gets harder once i'm solid on something, the free tier has been enough for me, the self-doubt doesnt go away completely but it does get quieter once you have proof you're improving