Self-Testing
Under many scenarios, testing yourself on what you’ve learned enhances your memory of information more so than studying. This is true even if you don’t get everything right and do nothing afterwards. Knowing this, it seems like a good idea to replace part of your studying time with self-testing.
But self-testing is not always easy to implement. If you want to test yourself with questions, you need to first find the questions. This is already a nontrivial task: sometimes the questions available are too hard, sometimes they are too easy, sometimes they are out of scope, sometimes they cover too little. In the worst case, there aren’t even any. Obviously the effectiveness of self-testing as a learning strategies depend on what questions you have. If you aren’t sure on the latter, the benefits you get have to be followed by a question mark.
Free Recall
A way to sidestep this problem is to test yourself without any question. This is easily done with free recall, where you recall what you learned without cues. In fact this was how the the classic research on the testing effect was done. It usually start with giving participants some materials to study, and then dividing them into a restudying group and a testing group. The restudying group gets to study the material again in later sessions. The testing group never sees the material again, but they are asked to recall what they have learned. Which group is going to remember more? A final test is given to find the answer, and the testing group usually outperforms the studying group.
It’s easy to incorporate recalling practice like this into your learning. You can do this within a few days of learning the content: with a blank note, recall everything you learned in a class, a chapter, or about a topic and write it into paragraphs. You do not have to follow how the information was originally presented. Start at any point and flow from idea to idea. This happens very naturally in practice. The ideas you write down will remind you of the related ideas you seen before. It goes like a chain reaction until you’ve exhausted everything you remember.
Because a lot of ideas are involved in a single recall practice, you will transition between them frequently. There are two ways of doing this. Making disconnected jumps is an option, but it is better to try to make connections. This is not to make the thing read better; the purpose is to show and to reinforce your understanding. Being able to relate ideas together shows that you are not just stuffing isolated chunks of information into your head—you really know how the concepts work together.
But you should do this only when you can, which means that it’s Ok and likely that you will make disconnected jumps. Unless you already know the content very well, some of the things you recall just won’t fit together with the rest. In this case there is no need to make a forced, awkward connection with other ideas. Your goal is to exhaust what you know and not further than that. The end product of free recalling often doesn’t look very nice and it’s not a problem.
After Recall
Now that you have written everything you know onto a note, what’s next? You probably would want to go back to the materials and see what you’ve missed. This is indeed a good time to get feedback. Reviewing the material now can help you identify what you don’t understand well and direct your energy into those parts.
What to do after reviewing? There are a number of options. A straightforward one is to do another free recall later. But this should not follow immediately after looking at the material, otherwise you will be merely stuffing information into your short-term memory, which lasts just long enough for you to output it. But holding information with this temporary store doesn’t involve the cognitive processing necessary to cause the memory-enhancing effect we want. Although you would be recalling a lot with good accurary, it doesn’t do much good for your learning.
It’s better to space out your recall. If you have restudied the materials after a recalling practice, you can do another free recall the next day or a few days later. This can continue until you think you remember and understand the topic well enough.
Sometimes a second recall may feel like duplicated effort—you spend much time writing something you have written before. This happens especially when you already do well in the first recall. There are several alternatives here. One is to simplify the recall with concept maps or diagrams. Instead of writing what you know into paragraphs, you represent them with diagrams. This can save you a lot of time while still giving you some practice.
Another option is to replace recalling by other tasks, like solving problems or writing essays on a relevant topic. They also involve retrival and usage of your knowledge, plus they also stimulate your thinking in ways free recalls do not. These tasks tend to be more complex, but they are probably accessible for you if you’ve proven your knowledge with recalling practice.
A Mental Block?
A difficulty when starting with free recall practice is the fear of forgetting. The practice reveals what you don’t know, and it’s not pleasant to know that you don’t know.
Here, it is important to distinguish self-tests from formal tests. The former is just a learning strategy—there’s no reward or punishment however you perform. The result doesn’t matter as much as how much it helps you learn. Free recalls help you to locate what you don’t know and allow you to focus on it subsequently. In the beginning the recalling performance can be bad, but why would this be a problem when you are new to the topic?
There is also the thing that you are not supposed to recall everything perfectly from memory. Missing details or parts are inevitable even if you know the topic very well. You won’t expect perfect recall even from the authors who wrote the text. Our brain is not designed to hold every bits of information, it is just not an efficient way of working. There’s nothing concerning if you miss things in your recalls—as long as you feel like you have a good grasp of it. In any realistic context, you will probably have some form of cues or assistance.