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Studying Appropriately For Exams
Activity 2: Practical Solutions: Studying “Appropriately” For Exams
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- Time frame: Approximately 15 Minutes
- Setting: Online or face-to-face
- Source: Chapter 8 Memory from Psychology, 7e by James S. Nairne and Dawn M. McBride
- Learning Objective: Assess the role of retrieval cues in remembering and explain how schemas aid in reconstructing memories and solving the problems of long-term remembering.
Studying “Appropriately” For Exams
You form an elaborate and distinctive memory record during encoding, which helps make certain that relevant retrieval cues are available when you need to remember. Practicing retrieval, through repeated self-testing, is one solid way to guarantee good performance over the long term. It also helps to space your practice—don’t cram all of your studying and self-testing into one marathon session the night before the test.
By studying the material at different times, and in different situations, you increase the chances that the information will be linked to lots of different retrieval cues. Perhaps most important, you should pay particular attention to the concept of transfer-appropriate processing: Make certain that when you test yourself, you do it in a way that resembles what you’ll be required to do on the classroom exam.
On a practical level, this means you need to think about the characteristics of an exam before you sit down to study. An essay exam, for example, is a kind of cued-recall test—you’re given a cue in the form of a test question, and you’re required to recall the most appropriate answer. To study for such a test, it’s best to practice cued recall: Make up questions relevant to the material and practice recalling the appropriate answer with only the test question as a cue. For a multiple-choice test, which is a kind of recognition test, it’s necessary to discriminate a correct answer from a group of incorrect answers (called distractors). The best way to study for a multiple-choice test is to practice with multiple-choice questions; either make up your own or use questions from a study guide.
Practice Reproducing the Material
Have you ever thought to yourself, “I’ll just read the chapter one more time before I go to bed, and I’ll ace the exam tomorrow”? Think about it from the perspective of transfer-appropriate processing—what exactly does the typical exam ask you to do? Exams don’t measure the speed or fluency with which the chapter can be read. Most exams require you to retrieve the material in the presence of cues. So, it makes a lot of sense to practice retrieving the information rather than simply reading it. Learn the material by reading the chapter but prepare for the exam by using processes similar to those required by the test. Practice reproducing the material by answering questions from memory or practice, discriminating correct from incorrect answers by responding to a variety of multiple choice questions.
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