"Active Recall" Touted as Study Technique

Students usually figure out their own particular way to study and, we hope, succeed on tests. A couple of journal articles have recently given credence to a rather old-fashioned strategy. Simply put, students should read the material presented in a textbook, then put the book aside and write down from memory what they recall. Rinse and repeat. The new studies also seem to support the use of incredibly traditional devices such as flash cards. This certainly looks like plain old memorization. 

What's next, reciting poetry? Multiplication drills? Verb conjugation?

Not surprisingly, according to the May 1 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription), some educational commentators think such an approach is precisely the sort of activity that should be purged from higher education. The critics naturally include advocates of the Course Redesign movement. It is a predictable discussion in some ways, but also surprising in that memorization is still regarded by some modern researchers as worthy of pursuit by students. It all depends on the extent of so-called "deeper" learning that occurs.

Here are a couple of key passages from the Chronicle piece by David Glenn:

Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. Make an outline. Reread each chapter.

That's not terrible advice. But some scientists would say that you've left out the most important step: Put the book aside and hide your notes. Then recall everything you can. Write it down, or, if you're uninhibited, say it out loud.

Two psychology journals have recently published papers showing that this strategy works, the latest findings from a decades-old body of research. When students study on their own, "active recall" — recitation, for instance, or flashcards and other self-quizzing — is the most effective way to inscribe something in long-term memory.

And:

In March, however, when [researcher] Mr. McDaniel took his message to the National Center for Academic Transformation meeting, his talk was not entirely well received.

Several days after his appearance, he got a note from Carol A. Twigg, the center's chief executive. "She said, 'We really loved having you, but you created some controversy here,'" Mr. McDaniel says. According to Ms. Twigg's note, some people worried that Mr. McDaniel's techniques might generate rote memorization at the expense of deeper kinds of learning.

Michael R. Reder, director of Connecticut College's Center for Teaching and Learning, had a similar reaction to one of Mr. McDaniel's new papers on studying.

The paper seems perfectly valid on its own terms and might offer a "useful tool," Mr. Reder says. But in his view, the paper also "suggests an old model of learning. You know, I'm going to give information to the students, and the students then memorize that information and then spit it back."

Mr. McDaniel finds such reactions frustrating. One experiment in his new paper suggests that a week after reading a complex passage, people who recited the material after reading it did much better at solving problems that involved analyzing and drawing inferences from the material than did people who simply read the passage twice.

"I don't think these techniques will necessarily result in rote memorization," Mr. McDaniel says. "If you ask people to free-recall, you can generate a better mental model of a subject area, and in turn that can lead to better problem-solving."

And in some college courses, he continues, a certain amount of memorization is impossible to escape — so it might as well be done effectively.

Comments

[John Soares]

Smart students will use the study methods that have the greatest payoff in terms of learning the material (as judged by test performance) versus the amount of time spent learning that material.

I'd like to see data on long-term memory retention -- a month, a year, three years out.