Remembering Stuff

Posted: July 14th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »

Flight delay….so I figured I’d throw up a wonky little blog.  It’s either that or buy a spy novel in the airport bookstore.

The KCPE exam requires Kenyan kids to remember a lot of stuff.  There is some research on “the testing effect.”  The basic idea is testing helps you remember stuff better.

UVa’s Dan Willingham:

Suppose, for example, that I present you with an English vocabulary word you don’t know and either

(1) provide a definition that you read [i.e., no testing, I just tell you]

(2) ask you to make up a definition or

(3) ask you to choose from among a couple of candidate definitions.

In conditions 2 & 3 you obviously must simply guess. (And if you get it wrong I’ll give you corrective feedback.) Will we see a testing effect?

That’s what Rosalind Potts & David Shanks set out to find, and across four experiments the evidence is quite consistent.

Yes, there is a testing effect. Subjects better remember the new definitions of English words when they first guess at what the meaning is–no matter how wild the guess.

Of course, there are some caveats, as the estimable Willingham provides.

In the USA, tests like MCAS don’t particularly value memorizing lists of stuff.  So I’ve never dug particularly deeply into the research on how help kids memorize well.  It’s on our team’s to-do list…..