Large-sample records of "did anyone answer when the question appeared" come only from MOOCs: for a question shown in the player when the video reaches its position, about 74% of people who started that video answered; for pop-up review questions, about 70% of multiple-choice and about 40% of type-a-number questions were attempted. Under random assignment, about half as many people did a task that required typing as did one that only required ticking a box. None of the studies I read measured readers of public articles, and this site's traffic statistics are aggregate and cannot show who answers.
With no intervention, readers' ability to tell which text they understood and which they did not averages a correlation of only 0.18, which the authors convert to about 55% accuracy. Writing a summary or keywords after reading everything, or answering practice questions before judging, makes judgments somewhat more accurate; just reading ready-made questions and answers showed no detectable benefit. Most of the evidence comes from college students reading expository texts in the lab.
Spreading practice across days shows an effect of about d = 0.54 in a meta-analysis of real classroom studies, which its authors consider smaller than a meta-analysis that mixed in lab studies. Spacing embedded in mathematics courses (which also involves interleaving) is g = 0.24, and when eight university STEM courses used the same procedure, the gain averaged only 1.5 percentage points, with no detectable difference. Rereading a week later showed no detectable advantage a week after that, and none of the studies in that classroom meta-analysis let learners decide for themselves whether to come back and review.
The most complete attempt, Quantum Country, embedded 112 questions in an essay that takes about four hours to read and then emailed readers to schedule reviews. Its authors rate the evidence that readers would remember much less without review as only emerging, and say there is no evidence it generalizes to other domains. When a MOOC pushed review questions to learners, about 80% of those assigned never touched them, and grades showed no detectable difference; the example that worked was a classroom experiment where review was scheduled into class time.
Put a video at the top if it covers the whole article, at the start of a section if it covers only that section; videos at the bottom often get skipped. Readers mostly rewatch specific segments, so every section should link to its timestamp and the intro should state the video's length. Prequestions and writing your own explanation after each segment have experimental support, but those experiments all used short material, a little over 20 minutes at most.
Three practices have meta-analytic support: give readers a fully worked example, ask them to explain for themselves, and state a common misconception before refuting it. Questions before reading mainly help the content they ask about, and most experiments used math and science materials, short texts, and college students.
Asked content gains the most, according to research on classroom quizzes and prequestions (I found no synthesis of inserted questions themselves with a legally available full text), and feedback works better the more information it carries, though that evidence comes from classrooms, computer-based materials, and short laboratory texts. Readability formulas explain only a quarter to a third of teachers' difficulty judgments, and 30 Bloom verb lists disagree on where the same verb belongs.
Dunlosky's 2013 review rated 10 study techniques; only self-testing and distributed practice earned 'high utility'. But a 2026 systematic review puts the effect at 0.22–0.46, and Pan & Rickard's transfer meta-analysis finds 'no positive transfer' once publication bias is corrected — making the premise in the framework's own name the piece that tests worst.