How to Boost Your Memory with Active Recall
Active recall is the process of actively trying to retrieve information from your own memory instead of passively consuming the information. Active recall strengthens memories and stores them in your mind longer. By actively testing yourself on things that you’ve memorized, you can remember it better.
The book Ultralearning has some interesting quotes and advice on active recall:
Testing yourself—trying to retrieve information without looking at the text—clearly outperformed all other conditions…
free recall still did better than using concept mapping to study…
Since tests usually come with feedback, that might explain why students who practiced self-testing beat the concept mappers or passive reviewers…
Why do many prefer to stick to concept mapping or the even less effective passive review, when simply closing the book and trying to recall as much as possible would help them so much more?
…Whether you are ready or not, retrieval practice works better. Especially if you combine retrieval with the ability to look up the answers, retrieval practice is a much better form of studying than the ones most students apply…
More difficult retrieval leads to better learning, provided the act of retrieval is itself successful.
Giving someone a test immediately after they learn something improves retention less than giving them a slight delay…
Should You Take the Final Exam Before the Class Even Begins?
A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper. Free recall like this is often very difficult, and there will be many things missed, even if you just finished reading the text in question. However, this difficulty is also a good reason why this practice is helpful.
[notetaking] Instead of writing that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, you could instead write the question “When was the Magna Carta signed?” with a reference to where to find the answer in case you forget…
What’s harder and more useful is to restate the big idea of a chapter or section as a question…
“Applied studies using actual classroom quizzes and real learning materials have usually found immediate feedback to be more effective than delay.”…Interestingly, laboratory studies tend to show that delaying the presentation of the correct response along with the original task (delayed feedback) is more effective… For hard problems, I suggest setting yourself a timer to encourage you to think hard on difficult problems before giving up to look at the correct answer.
Using Active Recall
An easy way to use active recall is to set up a spaced repetition system for yourself.
Also check out the Feynman Technique.
History of Active Recall
The effects of active recall or the testing effect have been know since at least as far back as the 17th century. Francis Bacon wrote in Novum Organum:
If you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails.
In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James wrote:
A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning by heart (for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the hook once more.
Edwina Abbott also did an early study on the effect in On the Analysis of the Factor Of Recall in the Learning Process (1909).
Discussions About Active Recall
Here are some discussions related to active recall:
