Active Recall

Active recall involves retrieving information from memory through, testing yourself at every stage revising.The act of retrieving information and data from our brains strengthens our retention and improves cognitive function.

Studies from 1939, 2010 and 2011 provide valuable verification of the effectiveness of active recall.

In these studies, researchers split students into 4 groups with each student tasked with learning the same material before being tested on this. However, each group was given different instructions for learning the content.

- The first group would read the material once.

- The second group would read the material four times.

- The third group would read the material then were told to make a mind map.

- The fourth group would read the material once, then recall as much as possible.

In both the verbatim test and inference test, when asked to recall facts, the active recall group significantly outperformed the other groups.

This study shows that testing yourself just once is more effective than rereading a chapter four times. This drastically improves the efficiency of your studies. This is such a simple technique but has such substantial, obvious benefits that we would be foolish to not use it!

I myself being a student use active recall/ retention everyday, revisiting topics, spending a meagre 20 minutes a day per subject. This enables facts to be encoded into my long term memory, ready for me to retrieve ie in an exam!