How to Study More Effectively • 187- Describe the Tulving and Pearlstone cued recall experiment and Mantyla’s
experiment in which he presented 600 words to his participants. What were
the procedure and results of each experiment, and what does each tell us about
retrieval? - What is encoding specifi city? Describe Godden and Baddeley’s “diving”
experiment and Grant’s studying experiment. What does each one illustrate
about encoding specifi city? About cued recall? - What is state-dependent learning? Describe Eich’s experiment.
- What is transfer-appropriate processing? Describe Morris’s transfer- appropriate
processing experiment. What implications do the results of this experiment
have for matching encoding and retrieval? For levels-of-processing theory?
How to Study More Eff ectively
How can you apply the principles we have been describing to help remember material
for your next exam? Many of the principles that have been discovered in the labora-
tory work outside the laboratory as well, and you can use some of them to increase the
effectiveness of your studying.
The ideas in this section are presented as suggestions for you to consider. I say
this because people’s learning styles differ, and what might work for one person might
be impractical or ineffective for another. Also, different types of material may require
different techniques. One method of studying may work best for memorizing lists or
defi nitions, and another method may be better for learning concepts or basic principles.
We will discuss the following six ways of increasing the effectiveness of your studying:- Elaborate
- Generate and test
- Organize
- Take breaks
- Match learning and testing conditions
- Avoid “illusions of learning”
ELABORATE
Because elaboration is one of the themes of this chapter, it should be no surprise that
elaboration is an important part of effective studying. The step that helps transfer the
material you are reading into long-term memory is elaboration—thinking about what
you are reading and giving it meaning by relating it to other things that you know. This
becomes easier as you learn more because your prior learning creates a structure on
which to hang new information.
Techniques based on association, such as creating images that link two things, as in
Figure 7.3, often prove useful for learning individual words or defi nitions. For example,
when I was fi rst learning the difference between proactive interference (old information
interferes with learning new information; see page 124) and retroactive interference
(new information interferes with remembering old information), I thought of a “pro”
football player smashing everything in his path as he runs forward in time. I no longer
need this image to remember what proactive interference is, but it was helpful when I
was fi rst learning this concept.
This principle of association is involved in the study technique of Student #1,
described on page 172 at the beginning of the chapter, in which she makes up a story,
thereby linking principles to characters in the storyline and also creating images that
she can later call up to help remember the material.Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.