Effectiveness of Active Recall

From What is active recall and how effective is it?:

One of the studies most often cited supporting the effectiveness of Active Recall is “The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning”, conducted by Jeffrey D. Karpicke (Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University) and Henry L. Roediger, III (Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis). The results were published in Science Magazine, 15 February 2008.

Briefly, a group of college students were each given the same 40 foreign language vocabulary word pairs to learn, then were tested on all of them. Once a student recalled a word pair correctly just once, that word pair was treated in one of four ways:

  1. The student continued to study and be tested on all 40 word pairs
  2. The student no longer studied that word pair, but continued to be tested on it
  3. The student continued to study that word pair, but was no longer tested on it
  4. The student no longer studied and was no longer tested on that word pair

Students then returned one week later for a repeat follow up test. The results of the study showed the following results:

Students who used active recall were able to remember about 80% of the new terms compared to 34% for the control group who passively went back through a series of cards until they learned everything again.

This same research group did another study to compare active recall with both passive (i.e. reading) methods and elaborative (creating concept maps). The active recall group’s success rate again outshone the others by a margin greater than 50%.