Here ’s a simple way to boost your learning from videos: the “prequestion”

By Christian Jarrett The “testing effect” is well-established in psychology: this is the finding that answering questions about what you’ve learned leads to better retention than simply studying the material for longer. Testing is beneficial because the act of recall entrenches learned material in our memories, and when we can’t answer, this helps us make our future revision more targeted. Less well-known and less well-understood is the effect of “prequestions”: questions pertaining to upcoming information that you attempt to answer before you’ve started learning that information. A new study in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition suggests that answering prequestions may be a simple and effective way to boost your learning from videos and perhaps short lectures too. Shana Carpenter and Alexander Toftness asked 85 students to watch a short video about the history of Easter Island. The video was split into three segments each of about two minutes length, and before each segment, half the students attempted to answer two prequestions that pertained to the upcoming video content, such as “How many families originally settled on the island of Rapa Nui?” (the students nearly always failed to answer the prequestions correctly and no feedback was given). The other students acted as controls and simply pressed a space bar to continue on to each new video segment. After the entire video was over, all the st...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Educational Memory Source Type: blogs