Highlighting and rereading are the two study habits kids reach for first. A major review of learning techniques ranked both of them weak.
The habits that feel like work
Ask a middle schooler how they studied and you will hear some version of "I highlighted the important parts and read it again." It looks busy. The page changes color. Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, and Willingham went through the evidence on ten popular techniques and put highlighting and rereading near the bottom. Practice testing and spaced practice sat at the top.
Highlighting fails for a boring reason. Deciding what looks important is easy when the sentence is sitting there. Recalling that sentence tomorrow is a different task. The first one does not train the second.
Swap the ritual
Read the section once. Close the book. Ask the child to tell you what it said, or to write three sentences with the book shut. Then open it and see what was missing. That is practice testing. It feels ruder than a highlighter. It works.
Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 experiments are the clean version of this. A recall test after reading beat extra reading on a delayed test. The students who reread were more confident and less accurate later. Homeschool makes that trap easy, because nobody else is going to expose the gap until you do.
- One clean read, then a closed-book retell.
- Turn headings into questions and answer them without looking.
- Use a short game or oral quiz on the same facts the next day.
- If they want a highlighter, let them mark after they can already say the line.
When a marker is still useful
A teenager extracting quotes for a paper needs a way to find them again. That is filing, not studying. Keep the two jobs separate. Study is production. Filing is leaving yourself a trail.
If the whole page ends up yellow, the child cannot tell what matters. That is a knowledge problem or a "they did not understand the passage" problem. Teach the passage. Do not buy a second pack of markers.