To learn more, don’t study. Take a test, advises the New York Times. College students who read a passage and took a test on the content, remembered 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who studied the material or drew “concept maps,” according to research published online in Science,
“I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,” said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor ofat . “I think that we’re tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.”
Students read about a scientific subject, such as how the digestive system works. One group read the text for five minutes, a second group studied the passage in four five-minute sessions, a third group “arranged information from the passage into a kind of diagram, writing details and ideas in hand-drawn bubbles and linking the bubbles in an organized way.” The final group read the material and wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes; then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test.
A week later, the test takers aced a short-answer test on their ability to recall facts and draw logical conclusions. The other groups were more confident but less competent.
The second experiment focused only on concept mapping and retrieval practice testing, with each student doing an exercise using each method. In this initial phase, researchers reported, students who made diagrams while consulting the passage included more detail than students asked to recall what they had just read in an essay.
But when they were evaluated a week later, the students in the testing group did much better than the concept mappers. They even did better when they were evaluated not with a short-answer test but with a test requiring them to draw a concept map from.
Struggling to remember information helps people learn, psychologists say.