At the start of many lessons, my students reach down into their bags to return with a massive selection of highlighters. These are subsequently used to turn their notes into a rainbow of colour, with every word highlighted unless it is an ‘a’, ‘the’ or ‘and’.
Perhaps you recognise this behaviour. Students often use this technique as it is easy to do, requires little investment and, on a visual level, illustrates output. There is nothing detrimental about learning by highlighting. However, it could prevent you from engaging in other, more productive strategies because you feel that, by identifying all those key phrases, you have ‘revised’ (Dunlosky et al. 2013).
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