Active learning techniques like summarizing, note-taking, and quizzing help you engage with the material and remember it better. These techniques are adaptive because they help you retain important information for future use. Active learning techniques can be used in a variety of ways to help improve your learning and retention of information, such as.
Learning and retaining information for many people within today’s school system is a struggle. Information can become skewed, easy to forget, mixed around and confused with other topics learned along with the information you’re trying to retain. There are many techniques or tips and tricks one can use to become more efficient in storing information in their mind and keeping it there. One of these techniques is interleaving. Interleaving is a technique used for retaining information at a higher rate in both short term and long term memory. The process of interleaving involves mixing around questions or terms from different topics while studying or learning new material. However, there is an argument against the effectiveness of interleaving. As Doug Rohrer, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, states in his article about interleaving, the argument is that some believe it can lead to an individual confusing certain information with one another (1). The example given was the words “illusion” and “allusion” (1). Despite this, research held on interleaving has shown that it does indeed improve recall.
Have you ever found yourself the night before a huge exam cramming in hours of studying when you could have started days ago? Or have you spread your studying out when preparing for a huge exam? I would guess that most people would agree with the first question even myself would agree with ending up in that situation before a huge exam. But which method is more effective to receive the greatest outcome from the exam that you are preparing for? First is to know these are both cognitive processes the first one being massed practice and the second one being distributed practice. Distributed practice is establishing a time to practice and engage with the material you are studying, and you do this over many different times not just once. Massed practice is when the material you are studying is done repeatedly within a short period of time, and is only done once (6). Now the big question is which one is better?
Have you ever procrastinated with studying the night before an exam thinking you understood what was going to be on it but once you get your exam score it’s lower than you were anticipating it to be? Almost all of us have been in a similar position where we either do not feel the need to study in general since we understand the curriculum that we have learned in class or do not feel the need to look over our notes, textbooks, or other resources. Though most of the time the answer that you were one hundred percent accurate on and you thought you knew so well happens to be incorrect. This concept of getting that wrong answer on your exam when you just had the intuition of getting it right is known as the misinformation effect. The Misinformation Effect is the tendency for information received after an event to interfere with one’s memory of the original happenings (1). There are many conflicts within the misinformation effect that may have got our minds to have a correct approach to certain circumstances within what we thought we knew within our studying but substantially it does not always happen to be the plan or the outcome we were hoping to get.