Come exam time, we all have our preferred revision technique. Some students swear by colourful mind maps. Others go for flash cards. The most common practice is rereading notes and highlighting the relevant material. The million-dollar question, though, is which method provides the biggest pay-off from those hours of hard graft.
It turns out that one technique stands head and shoulders above the rest 鈥� simple recall. Although it is more than two millennia since Aristotle wrote that 鈥渞epeatedly recalling a thing strengthens the memory鈥�, cognitive scientists have only recently come to appreciate the effectiveness of so-called 鈥渞etrieval practice鈥�.
In a landmark study in 2008, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, asked 40 students to learn the meaning of 40 Swahili words. Despite receiving no feedback on whether they were correct or not, those who were repeatedly asked to recall the words during the learning session aced the final test a week later, with an average score of 80 per cent. In contrast, those who repeatedly studied the words, without actively testing themselves, scored an average of just 36 per cent ().
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Karpicke鈥檚 latest results, published in January, show that retrieval practice also outstrips more active methods of study, such as drawing complex bubble diagrams to represent the information in a passage of text (). Other researchers have found that schoolchildren, university medical students and neurological patients in cognitive rehabilitation all do better at their tasks when they test their memory at regular intervals. 鈥淭he results have been very striking, showing benefits in all these different settings,鈥� says Andrew Butler of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who recently wrote a review of the evidence ().
Despite the benefits of retrieval practice, when Karpicke, Butler and colleagues asked students how they actually revise for exams, fewer than half said they use any form of self-testing or retrieval (). Yet all the evidence indicates that this much-overlooked technique should be at the core of any study regime.
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