Mindhack Monday

Depth of Processing

If you are or ever have been a student, then you know that in most cases teachers give you information and then test you on how much of that information that you can repeat back to them. This means that sadly, most of us are in the habit of memorizing things we are taught to do get better grades. Yes – sadly – because psychological research has shown that the intent to remember something is only a tiny factor in whether you actually remember it or not.
To illustrate this, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology (1969) Hyde and Jenkins published results from a study of differential effects of incidental tasks on the organization of recall of a list of highly associated words. For this study, participants were given a list of words to remember. Half of the participants were asked to rate the pleasantness of each word, and the other half were asked to check if the words contained the letters ‘e’ or ‘g’ to affect depth of processing. Some participants were also told that they would be tested on their memory of the words, and the other half were not told. This was intended to show the effects of intentional learning as opposed to incidental learning. Here is a graph of the results:

As you can see, whether or not participants wanted to remember didn’t affect how many words they actually remembered. What did affect the amount of words recalled, however, was the way that participants thought about the words when they encountered them.
So what should be taken away from this is that you shouldn’t stress yourself with revision like reading and rereading the material or flashcards. What you should do is reorganize the material in your own way and think about it in different ways. You will definitely recall the information easier if you use this method.