180 • CHAPTER 7 Long-Term Memory: Encoding and Retrieval
If you had a problem understanding the passage, you’re not alone, because so
did participants who read the passage in an experiment done by John Bransford
and Marcia Johnson (1972). More important, their participants also found it
extremely diffi cult to remember this passage.
To make sense of this passage, look at ● Figure 7.7 and then reread the pas-
sage. When you do this, the passage makes more sense. Bransford and Johnson’s
(1972) participants who saw this picture before they read the passage remem-
bered twice as much from the passage as participants who did not see the picture
or participants who saw the picture after they read the passage. The key here is
organization. The picture provides a mental framework that helps the reader link
one sentence to the next to create a meaningful story. The resulting organization
makes this passage easier to comprehend and much easier to remember later. This
example illustrates once again that the ability to remember material depends on
how that material is programmed into the mind.Testing A survey of student study techniques reveals that rereading the mate-
rial to be learned is the predominant method used for studying (Karpicke et al.,
2009). However, recent research shows that being tested on the material to be
remembered results in better memory than rereading it.
Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (2006) demonstrated the advantages
of testing using the experimental design in ● Figure 7.8. In the fi rst phase of
the experiment, college students read prose passages for 7 minutes followed
by a 2-minute break during which they solved math problems. Then one group
(the testing group) took a 7-minute recall test in which the were asked to
write down as much of the passage as they could remember, in no particular
order. The other group (the rereading group) were given 7 minutes to reread
the material.
In the second phase of the experiment, which occurred after a delay of
either 5 minutes, 2 days, or 1 week, participants were given the recall test in
which they wrote down what they remembered from the passage. The results,
in ● Figure 7.9, show that there was little difference between the rereading and
testing groups after the 5-minute delay. However, when performance for both
groups dropped during the 2-day and 1-week delays, the performance of the
testing group dropped much less, so the testing group’s performance was much
better after the delay. This enhanced performance due to testing is called the
testing effect. It has been demonstrated in a large number of experiments, both
in the laboratory and in classroom settings (Karpicke et al., 2009). For example,
testing resulted in better performance than rereading for eighth-grade students’
performance on a history test (Carpenter et al., 2009) and for college students’
performance on an exam in a brain and
behavior course (McDaniel et al., 2007).
Table 7.1 lists all of the examples we
have described of methods of encoding that
increase memory. What do these procedures
have in common? The testing and genera-
tion effects both involve actively creating
material. Similarities between the other pro-
cedures are not as obvious, but it is prob-
ably accurate to say that each, in its own
way, increases the richness of representa-
tion in memory by providing connections
between the material to be remembered
and other material in memory. For exam-
ple, when material is organized, it become
easier to form links between items (such as
apple, grape, and plum) in a list. What all
this means is that there is a close relationship● FIGURE 7.7 Picture used by
Bransford and Johnson (1972) to
illustrate the eff ect of organization
on memory. (Source: J. D. Bransford &
M. K. Johnson, “Contextual Prerequisites
for Understanding: Some Investigations of
Comprehension and Recall,” Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, Figure 1, 717–- Copyright © 1972 Elsevier Ltd. Republished
with permission.)
Read
passageSolve
math
problemsRecall
test5 minutes,
2 days, or
1 week7 minutes7 minutes 2 minutesDelayReread Delay
passageRecall
testTesting
groupTesting
groupRereading
groupRereading
groupRecall
test● FIGURE 7.8 Design of the Roediger and Karpicke (2006) “testing eff ect”
experiment.Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.