Highlighting is an indexing technique, and maybe a marginal improvement to reading. It's a piece of a solution.
That was really common when I was in school and is fairly low effort.
Study -> create -> study -> create is effective for us programmers using google but is study -> create -> study -> study ... more effective than study -> study... ?
If so, in my experience, then yes, integrating flash cards is much more effective. Especially for working professionals who often have to step away from what they are studying for many months at a time (except doing the cards for 15 minutes a day).
- A short length study period where a large proportion of time is used to create the cards allowing less time to 'test' their knowledge compared to if they had started reviewing right away.
- A medium length study period where the creation period is now a smaller proportion of the total time. Because they created the deck their self testing performance increases at a greater rate compared to testing with a deck given to them.
- A longer length study period where the creation period is now a negligible proportion of the total study time. The benefits of being the one who created the flashcards fade. Whether they created the flashcards or not matters less as knowledge of the deck is complete either way and studying the deck is done only for maintenence.
Either way this is just a question about the most effective way to 'download' knowledge. I'd always choose to make my own cards because I'd be able to make a more targeted deck and know how to use plugins to make the cards more interactive.
I, personally, just am reading a novel series Japanese, 8 books in. While reading, I have highlighted all the words/parts I didn't know in order to export them and make flashcards out of them. I haven't still started going through them, but the thought of doing so feels laborious, so procrastinating is bound to happen.
Has worked well for me.
I don’t see making flash cards in the list. Do you consider it summarization?