Yes. Trying to answer a question before you read the chapter that answers it makes you remember that answer better, even when your guess is wrong. The catch the usual advice leaves out: it helps with what you asked about and does almost nothing for the rest of the chapter. So the whole skill is choosing the question.
Before your next chapter:
- Write one or two questions the chapter should answer. Use the title, the headings, or the claim the last chapter left open. Aim for a question whose answer runs across the chapter, like “why does the author reject X, and what does she put in its place?”, not a single fact on one page.
- Answer them before you read. Guess. A wrong answer is fine, and a silent one in your head counts. Thirty seconds each, no looking.
- Read to find out. Keep the questions where you can see them and notice where the chapter answers them, or doesn’t.
- Close the book and answer them again. This time from what you read. Then check.
The rest of this page is the evidence behind those four steps, and the reason it will feel like a waste of time while it works.
Does asking questions before reading help you remember?
It does, and the evidence is better than the school-worksheet reputation suggests. Researchers call it the prequestion or pretesting effect.
The study that made it hard to dismiss was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied in September 2009 by Richland, Kornell and Kao (abstract). Across five experiments, people read an essay about vision. One group first tried to answer questions about concepts in the essay. The other group got extra reading time instead. The question group did better on the final test in every experiment. And the researchers only scored the questions people had got wrong beforehand, so the benefit came from failed attempts, not from people who already knew the answer.
Two later reviews say how big the effect is and where it stops. A preregistered meta-analysis by St. Hilaire, Chan and Ahn in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (published online 28 August 2023) found “a moderate specific effect (g = 0.54, k = 97) but a virtually nonexistent general effect (g = 0.04, k = 91)” (the paper). In plain terms: a real improvement on the material you were asked about, and close to zero on the material you weren’t. A second meta-analysis, published in Educational Psychology Review in December 2025, reached the same split.
It also holds up across a text with several parts. In Psychological Research (November 2024), Kliegl and Bäuml had people study four prose segments, with pretest questions just before each one or no questions at all (the paper). A day later, the pretested group recalled more across all four. That is close to what a reader does with a book, chapter by chapter.
Why does it only help with the parts you asked about?
Because a question is a spotlight. Once you have tried and failed to answer it, you read looking for the answer, and you notice it when it arrives. Everything outside the beam gets the same attention it would have had anyway.
That makes the choice of question the part that matters, and one study shows how to widen the beam. In Memory (2019), St. Hilaire, Carpenter and Jennings compared questions answered in one spot of a reading passage with “integrative” questions that needed connections across different parts of it (the paper). The one-spot questions helped only their own answers. The integrative questions did nothing at first. But when readers were told to look for the answers as they read, integrative questions improved memory for the questioned material and the rest of the passage.
For a book that means two rules:
- Ask about the argument, not a detail. “What is the author’s second reason?” lights up one paragraph. “How does this chapter get from the problem to the solution?” lights up the chapter.
- Read to answer it. A question you write and then forget about does less than one you keep checking against the page.
This is not the same as closing the book afterwards and testing yourself. That step, retrieval after reading, is the bigger lever and gets its own page: why you forget what you read. The question beforehand changes how you read. The recall afterwards is what makes it stick. Step 4 above is there for that reason.
Does it matter if your guess is wrong?
No. Guessing wrong is the normal case, and the studies are built around it. Richland’s team counted only the questions people got wrong beforehand. Steven Pan and Shana Carpenter’s 2023 review in Educational Psychology Review says the benefit appears “despite many erroneous responses being generated on initial tests”, on one condition: there has to be “an opportunity to study the correct answers afterwards” (the review). With a book, the chapter is that opportunity. A guess you never check against the text is just a guess.
Do you have to write the answer down?
Not necessarily. In Applied Cognitive Psychology (January 2026), Rivers, Berdelis, Pan and Tauber compared students who typed their answers before reading with students who answered in their heads. Both beat reading alone, “with no reliable difference between covert and overt” (the paper).
What does seem to matter is actually attempting it. In the fifth of Richland’s experiments, the comparison group was shown the questions but not asked to answer them. The group that tried still did better. Reading a question and moving on is not the same as trying to answer it.
Are “what you’ll learn” lists just as good as questions?
The evidence is split, so here are both results.
In the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (online 17 November 2025), Schweppe, Radloff and Fenzl ran two preregistered experiments with a textbook excerpt. Readers got open-ended questions first, learning objectives first, or nothing. The authors report “small to medium-sized effects in favor of prequestions compared with reading only and reading with learning objectives in both experiments” (abstract). Their reading is that an attempted answer does something a statement of goals does not.
The Rivers study above found no such advantage in its second experiment: prequestioning was “just as effective as reviewing statements about what was to come.”
So a list of what the chapter covers is not useless, and it may be enough. But turning each item into a question and attempting it costs you about a minute, and one careful comparison says it is worth more. That is the version worth doing.
Why it feels like wasting time
Answering questions you know you can’t answer feels silly. You will be tempted to skip ahead and just read.
That feeling is documented, and it is wrong. In five experiments reported in Memory & Cognition (2023), Pan and Rivers found that learners “are predisposed to believing that reading is more effective even after repeatedly experiencing both techniques” (the paper). Even after trying both, people tended to believe plain reading had served them better. You can’t use that feeling to decide whether it worked. Check at step 4 instead.
Where Study Junkie fits
The method above costs nothing. The friction is that a book doesn’t come with questions, and writing good ones for a chapter you haven’t read is hard.
Study Junkie turns a book you upload (PDF, DOCX or a text file) into a course of chapters built from the full text, never a summary. Each chapter has practice problems written from that chapter. They are meant to come after the chapter, but nothing stops you opening them first. Generate a chapter’s problems before you read it and attempt them cold. Each problem has its own tutor chat that gives hints without giving away the answer, so a failed first attempt stays a genuine guess. Then read the chapter and come back to solve them properly.
Two honest limits. Those problems assume you have read the chapter, so they are harder than a lab prequestion. Treat the first attempt as a guess and spend a minute on it, not an hour. And the “what will be learned” topics on each chapter card are learning objectives, the condition the evidence above is split on. Turn them into questions.
After the chapter, scheduled recall covers the other end. Once you switch it on, marking a chapter as read starts its recall sessions, on days 1, 3 and 7 by default. Each session asks open questions from that chapter, and you check your own answer against the one it reveals. For the full loop from chapters to problems to recall, see how it works. Verifying your email gives you 1,500 free Study Credits, with no card. After that it is one-time packs from $10 that don’t expire.
If you would rather do it by hand, the four steps at the top are all there is to it. For the capture side, what to do after the chapter if you’d rather not take notes, see how to remember what you read without taking notes.
Frequently asked questions
Should you read the end-of-chapter questions before reading the chapter? Yes, and try to answer them before you start, not just read them. A textbook’s end-of-chapter questions are ready-made prequestions. Pick the ones that ask about the chapter’s main argument, not the ones about a single definition, since you’ll mainly remember what you asked about.
How many questions should I ask before a chapter? No study gives a number for a book chapter. The research suggests fewer, better questions: each one mostly helps its own answer, so two questions about the main argument are worth more than ten about details. If you can’t keep them in mind while you read, you have too many.
Does this work for a whole book, or only a chapter? Chapter by chapter. The multi-part evidence (Kliegl and Bäuml’s four prose segments) asked questions just before each segment. A question you asked on page one of a 300-page book is too far away from the answer by the time it arrives. Before each chapter, ask again.
Is this the same as the SQ3R “Question” step? It is the same move, with the evidence added. SQ3R has you turn headings into questions before you read. The research says to attempt an answer too, even a wrong one, and to prefer questions whose answers run across the section. It also says the question only pays off if you then find and check the answer, so don’t skip the recall at the end.