Invitation to Psychology

290 ChaPteR 8 Memory

students learned words in foreign languages,

once a student had learned a word it was (a)

repeatedly studied but dropped from further

testing, (b) repeatedly tested but dropped from

further studying, or (c) dropped from study-

ing and testing. To the surprise of the students

themselves, studying after learning had no effect

on their subsequent ability to recall the foreign

words. But repeated testing, which caused them

to repeatedly retrieve the words from memory,

had a large benefit (Karpicke, 2012; Karpicke &

Roediger, 2008). So when your professors and

your textbook authors want to keep quizzing

you, it’s only for your own good!

Active Studying

(Read-Recite-

Review)

Elaborative

Rehearsal

Deep

Processing

Retrieval Practice

Practice

Processing

Effortful

Effective Encoding

HOW TO REMEMBER BETTER

Remembering the Strategies

for Learning

The very first learning strategy we introduced

in Chapter 1 was the 3R method—read, recite,

review—and we have helped you use it by

building it into every one of our quizzes in this

book. Now might be a good time to go back

and—you guessed it—review the other strate-

gies. They work because they encourage you

to process deeply, to use your imagination, to

use elaborative rehearsal, to test yourself, and

to think about what you are hearing or reading.

And they all have something important in com-

mon: They teach you to be an active rather than

a passive learner. Your memory isn’t a sponge

that simply soaks up whatever is poured on it.

Having a good memory requires you to trans-

form new information into something you can

understand, use, and retrieve when you most

need it.

Suppose that you are studying the con-

cept of working memory. Simply memorizing

the definition is unlikely to help much. But if

you can elaborate the concept, you are more

likely to remember it. The word working should

remind you that working memory is involved

in tasks that require effort and attention. And

effort and attention are related to the ability

to concentrate, resist distraction, and therefore

solve problems. Many students try to pare down

what they are learning to the bare essentials, but

knowing more details about something in fact

makes it more memorable; that is what elabora-

tion means.

A related strategy for prolonging retention

is deep processing, or the processing of meaning

(Craik & Lockhart, 1972). If you process only

the physical or sensory features of a stimulus,

such as how the word hypothalamus is spelled

and how it sounds, your processing will be shal-

low even if it is elaborated. If you recognize

patterns and assign labels to objects or events

(“Hypo means ‘below,’ so the hypothalamus must

be below the thalamus”), your processing will

be somewhat deeper. If you fully analyze the

meaning of what you are trying to remember

(perhaps by encoding the functions and impor-

tance of the hypothalamus), your processing will

be deeper yet. For some kinds of information,

shallow processing is useful; when you memorize

a poem, you will want to pay attention to (and

elaborately encode) the sounds of the words

and the patterns of rhythm in the poem and

not just the poem’s meaning. Usually, though,

deep processing is more effective. That is why,

if you try to memorize information that has

little  or no meaning for you, the information

may not stick.

Retrieval Practice

Many students think that the way to remember

course material for an exam is simply to study it

once thoroughly, or maybe twice. Unfortunately,

within just a few weeks or months after the

exam—or even before it—some of those answers

will have vanished like steam on a bathroom mir-

ror. Retrieval practice, the repeated retrieval of an

item of information from memory, is necessary if

a memory is to undergo consolidation and remain

available for a long time. After all, that’s the goal

of learning.

In a college course, a good way to ensure

retrieval practice is to take short quizzes after

you have learned some material but before the

big exam. In a series of experiments in which

deep processing In the
encoding of information,
the processing of mean-
ing rather than simply the
physical or sensory fea-
tures of a stimulus.