Food for Thought: Memory Recall Exercises Dale Hommerding, George Fust, Sean McMahon, Cole Spitzack, and Michael Wright This paper was completed and submitted in partial fulfillment of the Master Teacher Program, a 2-year faculty professional development program conducted by the Center for Faculty Excellence, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, 2020. Abstract Instructors constantly seek to improve their students’ retention of learned knowledge through a variety of pedagogical techniques. Existing scholarship suggests that incorporating memory recall exercises into the course of instruction may help improve long term student retention of information by “interrupting forgetting.” Our study seeks to expand upon previous studies to the undergraduate level. It seeks to determine an empirical correlation between performance and retrieval exercises. This study was primarily motivated by the authors’ participation in the Master Teacher Program at the United States Military Academy at West Point. It involved 10 different instructors teaching 370 students over the course of a semester. Our research yielded no significant findings to support the premise that interrupting forgetting improves student performance in a classroom environment using memory recall exercises. Furthermore, our research indicates memory recall exercises may have a negative effect on performance by unintentionally contaminating student understanding of course material. We recommend instructors consider alternative methods for improving student retention. Food for thought: memory recall exercises 2 Introduction A perennial challenge for students at any level is the retention, recall, and application of knowledge. One method consists of memory recall exercises, which involve short in-class writing exercises designed to activate students’ memory of previously covered course material into the course of instruction. Since improved knowledge retention is a goal that any teacher seeks to achieve, testing the validity of memory recall exercises can provide valuable insights to teachers in any discipline. Concepts discussed in the U.S. Military Academy’s Master Teacher Program provided the inspiration for this study. In particular, two chapters from Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger and Mark McDaniel’s Make it Stick1 provided our theoretical foundation. The chapter titled “To Learn, Retrieve” discusses positive aspects of repeated testing on students’ ability to retrieve information. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel highlight how “positive effects of repeated testing has been demonstrated many times in controlled laboratory settings, but rarely in a regular classroom setting.”1 Furthermore, the Make it Stick chapter titled “Embrace Difficulties” discusses positive benefits associated with difficult learning methods on subjects’ ability to retrieve information at a later date.2 Our study sought to test the validity of these concepts. Over the course of an academic semester, we conducted an experiment to test the effects of memory recall exercises on student retention. Throughout the semester, we incorporated several short memory recall exercises as part of a college-level sophomore American politics survey course and measured the effects these exercises had on student long-term retention, as measured by their performance on the final exam. In addition to testing the effects of such exercises on long-term retention, we also sought Food for thought: memory recall exercises 3 to test Brown and Roediger’s theories regarding the consequences of repeated testing and the effects of “desirable” difficulties on student performance.3 We found no evidence that our exercises had a positive effect on student knowledge retention. In fact, our results indicate that, to the degree that such exercises have an effect, that effect is negative. To our knowledge, this is the first experimental evidence that tests the effects of memory recall exercises at the college level, and our findings suggest that such exercises may not be an effective tool for improving long-term knowledge retention. Literature Review The idea that there are benefits to testing memory is not new. Sir Francis Bacon’s recognition in 1620 that “if you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails.”4 Modern researchers have devoted significant attention to assessing techniques meant to improve students’ ability to recall information. Experiments have tested retention through direct methods such as recall and recognition exercises.5 In free-recall tests, individuals are asked to recall previously presented information, such as recalling a list of words or objects from memory.6 Recognition tests typically provide a list of possible choices for subjects to reference. One common area of focus when studying retention is the testing effect, otherwise known as the retrieval-practice effect, which states that “practicing retrieval makes learning stick far better than re-exposure to the original material.”7 While the ideas behind testing memory to improve recollection dates back centuries, precise methods for improving memory through repeated testing are often either narrowly focused or yield inconclusive results. Food for thought: memory recall exercises 4 Multiple scholars have conducted experiments related to the testing effect with mixed results. Phillip Ballard pioneered experiments in 1913 showing an increase in children’s ability to recall poetry passages through testing. Ballard concluded that testing yields positive effects such as reminiscence, where individuals recall material on future tests that was not recalled on previous tests.8 In 1974, Erdelyi and Becker expanded on Ballard’s research by testing subjects’ ability to recall large sets of words or pictures. Their experiments provided evidence of memory improvements which they labeled as hypermnesia, where individuals recalled material on subsequent tests that they could not recall on previous tests.9 Research by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke suggest the process of test-taking yields greater positive results than an equivalent time spent studying “even when performance on the test is far from perfect and no feedback is given on missed information.”10 Collectively, prior research provides a foundation for the positive correlations between increased testing and student performance. However, separate experiments highlight drastically different conclusions and suggest potentially negative impacts from repeated testing. Frederick C. Bartlett’s experiments reveal an increase in forgetting and information distortion in subsequent tests after subjects learned prose passages and were tested both immediately following (15 minutes after studying) and later (within a week of learning the passage).11 Bartlett noticed that student performance declined over time as his research subjects forgot portions of the passages, but often re-created details of the story based on their own perceptions.12 This suggests an aspect of contamination resulting from inaccurate information learned during previous tests.13 James Deese also cautions against the use of repeated testing due to information contamination. Deese notes that repeated testing “yields very impure measures of retention after the first test, since all subsequent measures are contaminated by the practice the first test allows.”14 As opposed to previous conclusions Food for thought: memory recall exercises 5 highlighting testing’s ability to facilitate learning through reminiscence and hypermnesia, Deese highlights negative aspects of learning through testing due to contamination. Research highlighting reduced performance from repeated testing combined with the contamination effect contributes to a broader area of study into forgetting. In addition to contamination, other significant theories related to memory recall have been posited. Stuart Hulse and Howard Egeth discuss interference theory which is significant to the study of forgetting. Interference theory examines the relationship between a specific stimulus and a specific response (S-R). Hulse and Egeth suggest that providing more frequent stimuli, mostly through increased testing, may have either positive or negative effects on student performance.15 Evidence suggests that once a specific “S-R connection is established, it is not weakened by the passage of time; however, S-R associations interact with one another, producing behavioral changes that may be either facilitatory or inhibitory.”16 Additionally, a 2012 study by P. K. Agarwal, et. al. offers compelling evidence that interference theory is at play in middle school settings.17 This 5-year study provides the benchmark for our experiment at the undergraduate level. Thus, by creating additional stimuli through testing, one can expect to see a range of either positive or negative responses. For example, while testing could potentially provide a facilitatory benefit through hypermnesia, further stimulus-response interactions may inhibit recall by introducing information contamination. Accordingly, interference theory provides a framework for future experiments to examine the correlation between testing and retention. Even though significant prior research has been undertaken in examining impacts of the testing effect, the preponderance of tests focused on simple free-recall tests, such as recalling details from a prose passage, poetry verse, or list