By Cindy Nebel

We have occasionally received questions from educators about the SQ3R method and so I did some digging this week into the theoretical benefits of this method and the evidence to support its use. There is good news and bad news for folks who enjoy this method, but overall I think you’ll appreciate what I found (HINT: There might be a better way!).

What is SQ3R?

SQ3R stands for survey, question (or query), read, recite, review. It is a method designed in the 1940s to improve reading comprehension. Here is the brief overview of each step:

Survey: First, go through and get a lay of the land. Look at headings and subheadings, graphics, highlighted words, maybe summary paragraphs. Get an overview.

Question/Query: Generate questions about the text that you can answer as you read it. These can be general (e.g. What is this section about?), more specifically targeted at the content of, say, the subheadings, or targeted at how the knowledge might be useful for your purposes.

Read: Start actually reading, but as you do, use the questions that you generated above to create a more active reading process.

Recite: Describe what you have just read. This could be done out loud or in written format, but try to recall everything in your own words.

Review: Come back to the material again to review, trying to answer the questions that you generated before.

Ok, so, if you use this method you may have just read my descriptions and said, “Uh, that’s not what that means.” Here’s the kicker: There is wide disagreement on not only what each letter stands for, but how it is appropriately applied. In doing some research, I found one place that said this was “Survey, Question, Read, Reread, Recheck” and lots of others that described “Recite” as going back through and answering the questions while looking at the passage and others that describe “Review” as rereading. This is already leading us into bad news territory; a lot depends on how you’re using SQ3R.

Is SQ3R supported by science? The theoretical answer…

Theoretically, this method looks pretty good. The survey method helps to produce some overarching organization for the reader before they start reading and we know that organization is an important aspect of understanding and retaining information (1).

Using questions sounds very similar to elaboration, which is an effective way to connect new knowledge with information you already know and aids in organization. If they’re answering these questions during the read portion, then they’re engaging in the second half of the elaboration process.

Recite is essentially retrieval practice and checking for understanding.

Review seems to either incorporate feedback for the recitation OR involves spacing (depending on when the review is taking place).

All in all, that bodes pretty well for the SQ3R method. But here’s the bad news…

Is SQ3R supported by science? The research answer…

This method has very little empirical support. Very few individuals have studied SQ3R and subsequently published their findings. Of the few articles I could find, the results were mixed as to the effectiveness of the method, likely due to inconsistencies in the way it was used. One study did find that SQ3R outperformed a method called REAP, but it involved 9 weeks of training on each method (2). Without a more common definition and more rigorous experimentation, the jury is kind of out on this one.

However, there has been one study looking specifically at the 3R (Read, Recite, Review) portion of the SQ3R method (3). In this study, the researchers decided to drop the survey and questioning steps for a couple of reasons. Surveying and questioning are steps that require quite a bit of training, which makes them more difficult to assess in a laboratory setting. They are also more difficult to do correctly. That is, the effectiveness of questioning depends on the quality of the questions, whereas the effectiveness of recitation just depends on doing it.

In a series of two experiments, McDaniel, Howard, and Einstein gave participants passages to read in preparation for an upcoming test. In the 3R condition, participants read the passage, recited as much as they could remember into a tape recorder, and then read the passage again. There was also a note-taking condition where they were allowed to take notes while they read and a re-read condition where, you guessed it, they got to re-read the passage.

The researchers found that folks in the 3R group outperformed both other conditions in free recall and outperformed re-reading for inference questions. The 3R group also worked a lot faster than the note-taking group, meaning that their learning was more efficient!

Bottom Line

If you are currently using the SQ3R method, you should take a hard look at the underlying mechanisms. Are the generated questions high-quality elaborative questions? Does the survey really give you a good organizational framework with which to understand the text? Are you engaging in retrieval when you are reciting? If so, great! I see no reason why this method, when used appropriately, would not provide benefits to learning.

All that said, if you have been in any way disillusioned by this approach or you’ve tried it and it wasn’t working, it could be that it was being applied incorrectly, or that applying it correctly took a lot of work to get right. Maybe consider dropping the SQ and keep the 3R as a method that is quick to teach, efficient during study, and effective for learning.

References:

(1) Gernsbacher, M. A. (1991). Cognitive processes and mechanisms in language comprehension: The structure building framework. Psychology of learning and motivation, 27, 217-263.

(2) Martin, M.A. (1985). Students’ applications of self-questioning study techniques: An investigation of their efficacy. Reading Psychology, 6, 69–83.

(3) McDaniel, M. A., Howard, D. C., & Einstein, G. O. (2009). The read-recite-review study strategy: Effective and portable. Psychological Science, 20(4), 516-522.