Strengthening Memory Using Reinforcement Methods

While it may seem efficient, students are more likely to forget memorized material if they don’t reinforce their learning with other strategies, and a new study looks at how incorporating guesswork into a lesson can significantly boost students’ ability to recall information. The results from the two experiments in this study show that errors benefit memory to the extent that they overlap semantically with targets. Results are discussed in terms of the retrieval benefits of activating related concepts during learning.

Cyr, A., & Anderson, N. D. (2018). Learning from your mistakes: does it matter if you’re out in left foot, I mean field? Memory, 26(9), 1281-1290. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2018.1464189

Print News vs. Online News in Terms of Memory

A study by three doctoral candidates at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication found that print news readers remember “significantly more” than those who read news stories online. Print readers also remember “significantly more” topics than online readers, the report found. Print readers and online readers recall headlines equally well. The results reflect prior research that shows print subjects remembered more news stories than online subjects and suggest that the development of dynamic online story forms in the past decade have had little effect toward making them more impressionable than print stories.

Santana, A. D., Livingstone, R., & Cho, Y. (2011). Medium matters: Newsreaders’ recall and engagement with online and print newspapers. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. http://img.slate.com/media/66/MediumMatters.pdf