Practicing Active Recall

Learn how to learn: Practicing active recall

Why does active recall matter?

Approximately 52% of students say they prepare for an exam by Keep at it! rereading their notes.6 However, research shows that your time would be much better spent trying to recall what you have learned Research shows that unless you work without looking at your notes or textbook. One study found that on actively recalling what you’ve students who were repeatedly quizzed while learning new learned, you’ll forget approximately 60 vocabulary remembered about 80% of the words one week later. to 70% of the material within 24 hours On the other hand, students who kept rereading notes and most of it by the end of the remembered just 1% of the words after the same period of time.5.6 week.1,2,3,4

Surprisingly, most students don’t know that active recall is the most Don’t stop practicing after you have effective studying strategy. About 75% of science students who correctly recalled something once. took part in a research study said they believed that going over and Likewise, don’t stop using a flashcard over the material is more effective than active recall, even though just because you knew the answer the opposite is true.5,6 during your first study session. Here is how you can use active recall while studying: Research shows that students who Make active recall the focus of your study routine. Instead of recalled a list of new words just once rereading your notes or textbook, quiz yourself often on what remembered only 30% of those words you’ve learned. You could use your Cornell Notes, make flashcards, in one week’s time. The more often create your own questions, or find some tests online. you correctly recall something, the better you’ll remember it a few days or When quizzing yourself, try not to get discouraged if you make a weeks later.6 mistake. Research shows that students who made mistakes while quizzing themselves and then corrected them did better on a final test than students who just rehearsed the correct answers.7,8

Say it aloud and double-check. When trying to recall what you learned, say your answers out loud. According to one study, participants who studied words by saying them aloud remembered more words than those who read them silently.9

Try to answer questions without looking at the textbook, your notes, or the back of your flashcards. However, at the end of your practice session, don’t forget to carefully check your answers by comparing them to the material you’re studying. Research found that fewer than half of students checked their answers by flipping the flashcard over or looking at their notes because they believed their answers were correct. Even when students said they checked an answer, they were often so confident that they didn’t notice it was incomplete or wrong.10

Quiz yourself again, and again, and again. Most students say they believe that correctly recalling a fact more than once will help them remember it longer. However, only 34% try to do so while studying. However, if you want to remember what you’re studying, you’ll have to practice recalling it more than once.

Keep in mind, to be able to recall approximately 80% of the information you learned after one week, you’ll have to keep rehearsing until you can correctly remember it at least three times in a row on three different days.6,11 Let’s say you‘re trying to memorize the name of the capital of Palau, which is “Ngerulmud”. To improve your chances of

Learn how to learn: Active recall - © 2018 MyHealth Interactive Magazine | 1 remembering it a week from now, you’ll have to recall it correctly on the first day you start memorizing it (e.g., Sunday), and then later in the week on two more different days (e.g., Tuesday and Friday).

Space out your study sessions. Spaced learning means studying something more than once with time in between your study periods (e.g., morning and evening, Monday and Thursday). According to a large study on spaced learning, to remember more of what you studied, schedule your last two study sessions at least one day apart. That means, if your test is on Wednesday, you should go over the material covered on the test on Monday morning and again on Tuesday morning. In general, the longer the spacing between sessions, the longer you’ll be able to remember what you learned.6,12,13

Sources:

1 Ebbinghaus, H. (1964/1885). Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology (H. A. Ruger & C. E. Bussenius, Trans.). New York, NY: Dover. 2 Wixted, J. T., & Carpenter, S. K. (2007). The Wickelgren power law and the Ebbinghaus savings function. Psychological Science, 18, 133–134. 3 Rubin, D. C., & Wenzel, A. E. (1996). One hundred years of forgetting: A quantitative description of retention. Psychological Review, 103, 734-760. 4 Wixted, J.T. & Ebbesen, EB (1991). On the form of forgetting. Psychological science 2 (6), 409-415 5 Karpicke, J.D., Butler, A.C., & Roediger, H.L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practise retrieval when they study on their own? Memory, 17(4), 471-479. doi:10.1080/09658210802647009. 6 Karpicke, J.D., & Bauernschmidt, A. (2011). Spaced retrieval: Absolute spacing enhances learning regardless of relative spacing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37(5), 1250-1257. doi:10.1037/a0023436. 7 Kornell N, Hays M, Bjork R. Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance subsequent learning. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2009;35(6):989–998. [PubMed] 8 Bahrick, H. P., & Hall, L. K. (2005). The importance of retrieval failures to long-term retention: A metacognitive explanation of the spacing effect. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 566-577. 9 This time it’s personal: the memory benefit of hearing oneself. Forrin, Noah D. & MacLeod, Colin M. (2018). This time it’s personal: the memory benefit of hearing oneself. Memory, Volume 26, Issue 4, 574-579 10 Kathryn T. Wissman, Katherine A. Rawson & Mary A. Pyc (2012): How and when do students use flashcards? Memory, 20:6, 568-579 11 Rawson, K. A., & Dunlosky, J. (2011). Optimizing schedules of retrieval practice for durable and efficient learning: How much is enough? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 283–302. 12 Cepeda NJ. Pashler H. Vul E. Wixted JT. Rohrer D. Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin. 132. 3:354-380. 2006. 13. Krug, D., Davis, B., & Glover, J. A. (1990). Massed versus distributed repeated reading: A case of forgetting helping recall? Journal of Educational Psychology, 82, 366–371.