Transcribing, re-reading, highlighting, etc., are all bullshit study techniques. Seriously, if you want to bullshit someone into thinking that you are studying, without actually retaining much information, then those are the techniques to use. But if you’re interested in actually retaining information, then retrieval practice is the way. As Yang et al. (2023) summarize: "...[P]ractice testing (i.e., practice retrieval) is one of the most effective strategies to consolidate long-term retention of studied information and facilitate subsequent learning of new information, a phenomenon labeled the testing effect, the retrieval practice effect, or test-enhanced learning (Carpenter et al., 2022; Pan & Rickard, 2018; Roediger & Butler, 2011; Shanks et al., 2023; Yang et al., 2021). It has been firmly established that retrieval practice is more beneficial by comparison with many other learning strategies, such as restudying (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006b), note-taking (Heitmann et al., 2018; Rummer et al., 2017), concept-mapping (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011) and other elaborative strategies (Larsen et al., 2013)." TLDR: practice techniques that center around retrieving information directly from one’s brain produce superior learning outcomes compared to techniques that involve re-ingesting information from an external source.