Active recall

Active recall is a principle of efficient learning, which claims the need to actively stimulate memory during the learning process. It contrasts with passive review, in which the learning material is processed passively (e.g. by reading, watching, etc.). For example, reading a text about George Washington, with no further action, is a passive review. Answering the question "Who was the first US President?", is active recall. Active recall is very efficient in consolidating long-term memory.

A study done by J.D. Karpicke and H.L. Roediger, III (2008) lent support to the idea that practicing information retrieval is integral to learning. They had college students study 40 pairs of foreign language words on flash cards. One group learned the words by going through the deck of cards each time until they could recall all the words. The other group’s subjects dropped a card whenever they successfully recalled its paired word on the reverse side. Both groups alternated between study and test trials. Furthermore, half of the subjects were tested on the entire list during each test trial, while the other half were only tested on words they failed to recall on previous test trials. The results of a follow-up test on the entire list a week later clearly showed that those who were tested on the entire list during learning were able to recall a greater percentage of the word pairs (~80% as opposed to ~30% for the partial-list tested subjects). Results didn’t depend on how the students studied (entire list or only unrecalled pairs), only how they were tested. The authors concluded that more rigorous testing leads to better retrieval in the future.