Don’t trust your brain, trust the text!

By Holly Martin

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.

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Why You Can’t Trust Your Brain or Anyone Around You

By Robert Dragani and Hannah Kaczala

No college student is a stranger to the stress of exams. But sometimes we get lucky, and after hours of cramming, you might find a question on an exam that you know you studied; you specifically remember it from the study session. You confidently answer and feel accomplished in your study skills. A few weeks later, when your professor finally hands back your graded exam, you are flabbergasted that the question you thought you nailed was marked incorrect. You crack open your textbook, because you’re sure you had it right. The book takes your teacher’s side and you wonder where in your learning you got mixed up. Does this sound familiar to you? If so, you might have fallen victim to what psychologists call the Misinformation Effect.  

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