Students may forget relevant information in order to protect their own psyches

“What’s too painful to remember/ We simply choose to forget.” – Barbra Streisand, “The Way We Were”UCLA-led research has found that students in a college mathematics course experienced a phenomenon similar to repression, the psychological process in which people forget emotional or traumatic events to protect themselves.In a studypublished online by the Journal of Educational Psychology, the researchers found that the students who forgot the most content from the class were those who reported a high level of stress during the course. But, paradoxically, the study also found that the strong relationship between stress level and the tendency to forget course material was most prevalent among the students who are most confident in their own mathematical abilities.The phenomenon, which the authors call “motivated forgetting,” may occur because students are subconsciously protecting their own self-image as excellent mathematicians, said Gerardo Ramirez, a UCLA assistant professor of psychology and the study’s lead author.For the study, researchers analyzed 117 undergraduates in an advanced calculus course at UCLA. The students generally consider themselves to be strong in mathematics and plan to pursue careers that rely on high-level mathematical skills, so the logical assumption would be that they would be likely to remember most of the material from the course.Researchers asked students a series of questions at the start of the course, including having them as...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news