Reading the same material again feels productive. The concepts are familiar; they make sense as you read; you reach the end with a sense of having reinforced your knowledge. This feeling is unreliable.
The familiarity you experience on a re-read comes from recognition, not recall. Recognition is the ability to confirm that something is correct when you see it. Recall is the ability to produce it under pressure, without a prompt. These are different cognitive skills with different requirements.
A design review does not give you prompts. An interview does not let you re-read. An incident at 2am does not provide familiar-looking context. In those situations, recall is the only skill that matters.
Active recall — attempting to produce the information before looking at it — is what trains recall. Every time you attempt recall and succeed, the pathway is strengthened. Every time you attempt recall, fail, and then look up the answer, the correction also strengthens the pathway more than re-reading would.
The revision protocols below are designed around active recall.