Protocol
Ask a few target questions before you study
A prequestion is a spotlight, not a guarantee that the rest of the material will improve.
Before you use it
- Use when
- You are about to read or watch unfamiliar material and want a small set of important details or concepts to receive more attention.
- Avoid when
- Do not spend scarce study time generating many prequestions. Classroom evidence is mixed, and the best pooled evidence shows little general benefit for material you did not ask about.
An idea to explore.
Try this idea.
Inspect the example, try the idea in your situation, then check your next move.
Why it matters
Before studying, write two to four questions about material you expect to encounter and make a brief answer attempt without looking. Then study normally and deliberately notice the answers when they appear. Afterward, retrieve the answers again and separately test anything important that was not prequestioned. The strongest evidence is for the queried material; do not assume the attention boost spreads across the whole lesson.
Steps
- Choose a few questions that point to genuinely important material.
- Attempt each answer briefly before opening the source; guessing is acceptable.
- Study and mark where the source resolves each question.
- After study, answer the questions again from memory.
- Use ordinary retrieval or application checks for important material that was never prequestioned.
An example
Before a SAP training chapter, ask what triggers a workflow, what object changes, and what the failure path looks like. Read for those answers, then test additional concepts separately instead of assuming they were learned too.
Check your result
You can answer the targeted questions later without the source, and you have a separate check for unqueried material that matters.
Keep this limit in mind
- Do not spend scarce study time generating many prequestions. Classroom evidence is mixed, and the best pooled evidence shows little general benefit for material you did not ask about.
My learning
Read. Recall. Repeat.
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Evidence and sources (4)
A preregistered meta-analysis found a moderate benefit of prequestions for the material that was initially queried (g = 0.54, k = 97).
The pooled effect was heterogeneous, so the magnitude should not be treated as a fixed effect for every subject, learner or format.
Guessing as a learning intervention: A meta-analytic review of the prequestion effect · Overall effect size; specific prequestion effect
The same meta-analysis found virtually no pooled benefit for new, unqueried material (g = 0.04, k = 91).
Some studies showed positive general effects, but the pooled estimate was near zero and the evidence was heterogeneous.
Guessing as a learning intervention: A meta-analytic review of the prequestion effect · Overall effect size; general prequestion effect
In an undergraduate chemical-engineering course, prequestions did not improve weekly quiz performance relative to material that had not been prequestioned, whereas end-of-class retrieval practice did improve later performance.
This is one course and instructional context, so it limits classroom generalization rather than proving that prequestions never work in classrooms.
Prequestions do not enhance the benefits of retrieval in a STEM classroom · Discussion and conclusions
Two preregistered text-learning experiments reported small-to-medium advantages for prequestions over reading-only and learning-objective controls, suggesting that an answer attempt can add value beyond a generic attention cue in some text-learning settings.
The experiments used textbook excerpts and controlled final tests; transfer to long courses, complex skills or unqueried material remains uncertain.
Do prequestions support learning from text more than learning objectives? · Abstract
Edition and review
Version 0.2.0 · Published
No review details are supplied for this edition.