Some Assembly Required: Self-Testing Alone is Not an Effective Way to Build Broader Understanding.

The article focuses on a study comparing the effects of self-testing, self-explanation, and reading strategies on memory retention and comprehension. It reports that while self-testing enhances long-term recall of individual facts by strengthening retrieval processes, it does not improve the ability to integrate information into coherent mental models or support inference-making. In contrast, self-explanation promotes the generation of inferences, which better facilitates understanding across multiple ideas, though this effect varies by domain, being less pronounced with science texts than narratives. These findings suggest that effective learning involves not only memory retrieval but also active inference generation to construct meaningful knowledge structures. The study is based on a preprint that has not yet undergone peer review. [Extracted from the article]