When students ask for a study advice, many professors would say something like this: "Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. Make an outline. Reread each chapter." That's not terrible advice. Some scientists would say that professors left out the most important step: "Put the book aside and hide the notes. Then recall everything. Write it down or say it out loud." Two psychology journals have recently published papers showing that this strategy works, the latest findings from a decades-old body of research. When students study on their own, "active recall"--recitation, for instance, or flashcards and other self-quizzing--is the most effective way to inscribe something in long-term memory. Yet many college instructors are only dimly familiar with that research. And in March, when Mark A. McDaniel, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and one author of the new studies, gave a talk at a conference of the National Center for Academic Transformation, people fretted that the approach was oriented toward robotic memorization, not true learning. McDaniel finds such reactions frustrating. One experiment in his new paper suggests that a week after reading a complex passage, people who recited the material after reading it did much better at solving problems that involved analyzing and drawing inferences from the material than did people who simply read the passage twice. McDaniel believes that these techniques will not necessarily result in rote memorization. McDaniel and several other scholars recently wrote an essay about applying basic research about learning in real-world classrooms. One of his co-authors says that he is a bit more cautious than McDaniel about trying to bring new findings from the lab into the real world. Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University, agrees that scholars should be sensitive to real-world complexities. One way to ensure that sensitivity, he says, would be for college "teaching centers" to foster conversations between research psychologists and classroom instructors from various disciplines