Practical Applications
The generation effect appears promising as a strategy for learning, and particularly for remembering educational material. Currently, researchers at UCLA and UC Berkeley are investigating ways to incorporate learning strategies such as the generation effect, as well as other "desirable difficulties", into the classroom .
There are some ways that you could use generation to aid in memory retention. Here are some examples:
- Read a section of your book. Then, close the book and generate (and answer) questions about what you just read.
- If there are review questions at the end of a chapter, answer those questions without looking back at the pages.
- Use flashcards to test yourself.
- If you are an educator (or if you want to write a practice test for a friend), create tests that require fill-in-the-blank, short answer, or essay responses rather than multiple-choice responses.
- While reading a wikipedia article, try editing it to make it clearer and more understandable.
Read more about this topic: Generation Effect
Famous quotes containing the word practical:
“The best way to teach a child restraint and generosity is to be a model of those qualities yourself. If your child sees that you want a particular item but refrain from buying it, either because it isn’t practical or because you can’t afford it, he will begin to understand restraint. Likewise, if you donate books or clothing to charity, take him with you to distribute the items to teach him about generosity.”
—Lawrence Balter (20th century)