Cindy is a college freshman, taking psychology. She made a D on the first test covering three modules, and she is trying to figure out what went wrong. She highlights in her book as the teacher lectures, and she got up at 5:00 a.m., studied four hours for the test before she skipped breakfast and went to her first class, which was history, and then took her psychology test. Explain why her study

Question

methods are INEFFECTIVE and give Cindy some good study tips.

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer will include that Cindy's study strategies are ineffective because (1) she is probably not being selective in her highlighting of information in the textbook; (2) she is using massed practice, or cramming, to study rather than spaced study sessions; (3) she took the test while hungry, which usually hinders one's performance; and (4) interference probably occurred since she went to history after cramming. Some good tips would include using the following encoding strategies. (1) Elaborative processing. Most importantly, Cindy should use elaborative processing in studying, because rote rehearsal alone is not very effective. She must connect new information in her studies to information she already knows. This will also help her have more retrieval cues that can be used for retrieval. (2) Selection. She should summarize each paragraph in her textbook to one or two important terms or ideas and practice very selective marking in her textbook, using marginal notes to further summarize ideas. (3) Organization. Cindy should reorganize any lists she has to learn into chunks and rehearse the middle sections more to prevent the serial position effect. (4) Overlearning. After she has learned material well enough to remember it once without error, she should continue studying. Overlearning is the best insurance against going blank on a test because of being nervous. (5) Spaced practice. By improving attention and consolidation, three 20-minute spaced practice study sessions can produce more learning than one hour of continuous (massed practice) study. Retrieval cues that could also help Cindy include: (1) Recitation. When she is reading a text, she should stop frequently and try to remember what she has just read by restating it in her own words. In one classic experiment, the best memory score was earned by a group of students who spent 80 percent of their time reciting and only 20 percent reading. (2) Review. The night before the test should be spent reviewing not learning a great deal of new material, which could cause interference.