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I find that having to guess at questions I simply do not know the answer to can actually prevent me from retaining the right information. Because it forces me t

by danneu 13y ago

I find that having to guess at questions I simply do not know the answer to can actually prevent me from retaining the right information. Because it forces me to rationalize and objectify my guess which will now have to compete with the real answer in my head once I want to retrieve it. I ended up clicking "No" every time and just read the information. Lots of good morsels in there. Then I went back and took the quiz to test my retention.

bcjordan 13y ago
Though I have felt the intuition you mentioned, here's a study that found that test-then-study-then-test leads to better recall than just-study-then-test: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/335.abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/335.abstract
- danneu 13y ago
  > To test this hypothesis, we presented 118 participants with > 48 Swahili-English translation pairs for an initial study trial > and then three blocks of practice trials. I didn't get to study before my test, but the participants in the paper got to study before their first test. To attempt to use the language of that study, when I take a test with no prior study, I suspect that I'm creating mediators based on my arbitrary guesses. I'm wiring up false assertions in my brain because I'm forced to rationalize and make a "best guess". Once I get to study for the first time though, I trample over all those forced assertions. Retrieving the correct information now becomes an exercise in being able to disentangle or even distinguish truth from my own rationalizations. To make matters worse, all of my initial rationalizations sound reasonable to me where the truth may be less reasonable (especially regarding browser quirks and other arbitrary bits of data). That's a whole class of extraneous junk data that I suspect you can minimize by getting to study before your first test.

by danneu 13y ago

bcjordan 13y ago

Though I have felt the intuition you mentioned, here's a study that found that test-then-study-then-test leads to better recall than just-study-then-test: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/335.abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/335.abstract

danneu 13y ago
> To test this hypothesis, we presented 118 participants with > 48 Swahili-English translation pairs for an initial study trial > and then three blocks of practice trials. I didn't get to study before my test, but the participants in the paper got to study before their first test. To attempt to use the language of that study, when I take a test with no prior study, I suspect that I'm creating mediators based on my arbitrary guesses. I'm wiring up false assertions in my brain because I'm forced to rationalize and make a "best guess". Once I get to study for the first time though, I trample over all those forced assertions. Retrieving the correct information now becomes an exercise in being able to disentangle or even distinguish truth from my own rationalizations. To make matters worse, all of my initial rationalizations sound reasonable to me where the truth may be less reasonable (especially regarding browser quirks and other arbitrary bits of data). That's a whole class of extraneous junk data that I suspect you can minimize by getting to study before your first test.