Tests cause most students considerable anxiety. That’s good, because it usually motivates them to study. However, when it’s time to take the exam, excessive anxiety can compromise how students perform. They miss questions that they knew the answer to, or so they tell us. We listen skeptically, but in some cases what students report is true. High anxiety makes it hard to focus on exam questions. Kristel Gallagher explains that the problem is made worse when they have trouble retrieving the information needed for the answer.
Gallagher, a psychologist, explains that when you’re thinking about what needs to be learned, the process of acquiring and encoding the information is emphasized. Then we assume that if you’ve gotten the information encoded and stored it in memory, the hard part is done. “Retrieval should be the easy part. The information is there. It just needs to get out” (p. 165). But that assumption is wrong. Encoding, storage, and retrieval are three separate parts of the learning process. Retrieval involves reconstructing the knowledge. Unless the information has been memorized, word for word, when it’s located and retrieved, learners re-form the words used to describe what’s there in memory. That process of reconstructing takes up a good deal of the actual learning.
Retrieval cues play an important role in that reconstruction: “Effective retrieval cues are those that help people reconstruct accurate information for the given situation—they guide you in sifting through the storage container and piecing together the necessary details” (p. 165). Gallagher got interested in the possibility of embedding retrieval cues in test questions. Would they guide students to the information they’d encoded and help them retrieve what they needed to answer the question?
Research has shown that the most effective retrieval cues are those that tighten and narrow the sifting process. Gallagher illustrates how that works. For the exam, her students need to learn what “stimulus generalization” means. She explains the concept and then uses her two cats, Lilo and Stitch, to show how it works. They’ve learned to fear a Windex bottle because a squirt of water has been used to train them. Students could associate the concept with the chapter in their text on “Learning,” specifically the chapter section on “Classical Conditioning,” where it’s explained, but the specificity of the cats’ names provides that narrower focus needed to expedite the retrieval process.
Gallagher tested her retrieval cue hypothesis in two courses, a lower and upper division psychology course. On an exam in each of the courses, retrieval cues were embedded in some of the exam questions taken by some of the students. The same questions minus the retrieval cues appeared on the exams taken by the other students. In both cases, the presence of the retrieval cues makes a statistically significant difference in scores on those questions: 95.2 percent (SD = 5.02 percent) with the cues and 82.3 percent (SD = 15.8 percent) without them in the upper division course and 81 percent (SD = 18 percent) with the cues and 75. 6 percent (SD = 19.8 percent) with them in the lower division course.
But did the presence of the retrieval cues make the questions too easy? Did they water down the rigor of the exam? Gallagher says they did not. She uses exam questions to illustrate. Here’s one: “Under which of the following conditions will groups tend to make better decisions than individuals (such as estimating the number of Skittles in a jar)?” She explains, “If the student has never encoded or stored the information required to answer the question, a retrieval cue will do nothing more than force the student to spend more time reading the question” (p. 169).
In addition to improving exam scores, experience with retrieval cues gives students an important study strategy that they can use in other courses and after college. To be effective, retrieval cues do not need to come from the teacher. In fact, some research supports the idea that the retrieval cues learners make for themselves are more memorable than those the teacher provides. “The simple fact of having students generate their own retrieval cues forces them to actively engage with material and encourages deeper processing of the information” (p. 169).
Reference:
Gallagher, K. M. (2017). Retrieval cues on tests: A strategy for helping students overcome retrieval failure. College Teaching, 65(4), 164–171.
