Active Recall | Studying Effectively for GCSE's & A-level's

hey friends welcome back to our series on streaming pixely for gcse's nail laws in this video we will be discussing perhaps the most powerful studio technique and understanding why is so effective by looking at a few of the several hundred research experiments conducted over the last hundred years before we begin do bear in mind that i will be using the words active recall and practice testing interchangeably here but as always timestamps will be in the description down below so do check those out during the video let's begin by asking what is active recall in short is a process of

repeatedly retrieving information that you want to remember in your long-term memory by testing yourself over and over again instead of passively rereading a textbook or re-watching videos on topic it turns out it's far more beneficial to try and retrieve the information to do with topic from our memory and the more often we do so the easier it becomes to retrieve in the future and that's pretty much it to improve our long-term retention of effects or an idea and retrieve it quickly in the future we just have to practice retrieving it more often now this makes sense if you think about it everyone says that we get better at skill by practicing it more often and since in most exams we are mostly tested on how well we can retrieve their relevant information for some question it makes sense that retrieval is a skill we should be practicing if we practice retrieving the information during our study sessions before our exams then during our exams we will be able to retrieve it more easily and when i first encounter this idea of active recall i thought it was too simple to be true yet research has consistently shown that active recall is the fastest most efficient and most effective way to study material and to consolidate information into long-term memory but before we look at ways to implement it let's look at some scientific studies to get a sense of how powerful active recall actually is and understand why we should be using it more often now there have been hundreds

of studies which have looked into effectiveness of active recall but fortunately instead of reading all their studies ourselves the researchers from the research review that i mentioned before have read more than 120 papers on active recall for us they said that most of the papers came to the same conclusion that active recall is incredibly powerful studying technique take this 2008 study in which students were split up into two groups and were presented with a swahili english word pestilence the first group alternated between studying and retrieval sessions in which active recall was used and once a word was recalled correctly it was dropped from the next 3d session but was still in the next retrieval session the second group had this flipped over way around and after recalling a word it was dropped from the next retrieval session but still appeared in the next study session this meant that the first group was using acts to recall more often and the second group were just restarting the words by rereading them at the end of the learning phase the students were dismissed and returned a week later to a lab the students then took a test and it was found out that the students who tested themselves from the learning fees using active recall scored on average eighty percent on the final test and those who only restudied and only test themselves once for this learning phase scored 36 percent now this difference in score is absolutely huge the fact that you can score 44 in some tests just by using active recall more often is amazing to me it goes to show like we said before comparing the hours you're putting in studying to what your friends are putting in is useless unless you know what they're doing during those study sessions you both could study for the same amounts of hours and something completely new to both of you like swahili english translations but you could score on average 44 more just by using active recall instead of rereading and repeating the words to yourself over and it isn't just in that study in a nervous study in subtesting word pairs the researchers presented students with a text study for seven minutes one group of students were told to study the text again for another seven minutes and the second group were given a blank sheet on which i had to recall as much information from the text as they could after a five-minute break the students were given a test and those who re-studied the text in the second session scored 80 and the students who took the test in the second session scored 75 but then this flipped around because two days later they were given another test and those who studied for the second session scored 53 and those who took the test scored 68 and after a week they were given another test and those who re-studied scored 42 percent whilst those who took the test scored 56 now this means that given the same amount of time choosing to restudy a text may not be as effective in the long term as choosing to test yourself in the text instead and as you can see from the study the students who use active recall consistently perform better in the test taking any reasonable length of time after and this is what we want because you will very rarely take a test five minutes after eurovision even if you do you can't cram say an entire a-level syllabus in 10 minutes before your real exam and since there is always a reasonable delay between when you study and the test you take it's better to test yourself more frequently using active recall now you may be thinking this is all well and good but the studies you mentioned are just for memory based tests i need to learn concepts too for my exams but fortunately studies show the active recall works for concepts too take this study from 2010 as example as before students were presented with a text for initial study followed by either repeated restudying or repeated practice on a short question answers test which had feedback provided and this test touched on many of the key facts and concepts from the text they just read about a week later all the students were then tested and were given questions that require them to apply the information they learned a week before about batwings to make inferences about the development of new types of aircraft and once again the students used that to recall perform better now i could go into dozens of experiments which show very similar results but i don't want this whole video to be all about experiments we get the point that active recall isn't just good for memorizing direct translations such as swahili english wordpairs but works incredibly well for facts and concepts too

now the question then becomes because this is such a powerful study technique why doesn't every student use it and that's what i ask myself pretty much every day the researchers think that it's generally to do with the fact that students dislike the idea of tests given that commonly performed in high stake environments where their score can determine factors like what's at their next year what their predicted grades will be what sixth form or university they may go to and whatnot furthermore compared to re-reading testing yourself can feel awkward and frustrating for many students especially for recently learned material which can be particularly hard to recall and for some students it just doesn't feel as productive as rereading their class notes or highlighting passages from textbooks videos but ultimately it's found that students who don't quiz themselves tend to overestimate how well they've mastered the material because they consider the ease at which they can read or follow an argument as an indication that they already know it and that they won't have to study again later on but the underlying truth is that testing yourself more often free active recall is by far the most effective way you can study and those who consistently use it realize it isn't as bad and they start to enjoy testing themselves and more often for me personally it sort of begins to feel like a game with how many flash cards i can recall or how many questions i can get right it was also found that in all the studies of testing that reported how students felt the students who test themselves more often enjoy their classes more and rates them more favorably than the students who didn't test themselves as often and the former group also did not need to cram for exams because they managed to do most of their testing from here also it's worth bearing in mind that many students do use active recall but don't realize what they're doing is active recall giving it a name and realizing its effectiveness through the aforementioned studies should hopefully help you realize that you should be using active recon more often and now hopefully that you are now

convinced active recall is by far the best way to study for exams you want to know how you can implement it more frequently during the revision but if you disagree with me in the researchers and you don't want to use active recall then i'm afraid you're going to be systematically missing out on the top grades for some time for now i will mention some ways on how to incorporate active recall i will be brief here because incorporating exit recall will be the focus on many future videos in the series the most common ways of using active recall is number one using a blank piece of paper and writing down everything you can remember about the topic this is known as free recall because there's nothing to trigger that information from your memory besides the title itself number two by doing end of chapter textbook questions number three by using past papers or topic tests or just questions made by exam boards and finally number four doing flashcards and i don't mean those so-called flashcards where people just write information on a small piece of paper and flip through the deck and re-read the information i mean flashcards which have a question on one side and it ends on another side as people learn about in the next episode of the series flashcards are especially powerful because they make use of something known as space repetition as

well finally after the researchers from the research review read over a hundred different studies and act of recall they came to the following conclusion on the basis of the evidence described above we rank practice testing as having high utility testing effects have been demonstrated across a impressive range of practice test formats kinds of material learner edges outcome measures and retention intervals thus process testing has broad applicability practice testing is not particularly time insensitive relative to techniques and it can be implemented with minimal training finally several studies have provided evidence of the efficacy of practice testing in representative educational context which basically means that active recall is great and it works on many different types of tests types of materials it works for people of all ages and it can be applied to pretty much anything and doesn't take much time in training to use so hopefully going forwards in our studies we should try to look for more ways to implement active recall because we have seen that numerous times given the same amount of time so one using acts of recall will always perform better than someone who hasn't used it and the effects last much longer too as it takes longer for someone who has used active recall study to forget the same information as someone who hasn't anyways that's basically for this video in the next video in the series we will be learning about space repetition which will help us use active recall even more effectively