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Essentials of Learning: Recall Phase |
Essentials of Learning: Recall Phase
In order to qualify as a more-or-less permanent behavior modification, an act of learning must include a phase in which the learned modification is recalled so that it can be exhibited as a performance. The process at work during this phase is called retrieval. Somehow, the memory store is searched and the learned entity revivified. What has been stored becomes "accessible." The process is presumably at work even for learning which has occurred a few minutes previously. To be sure, however, there maybe differences in the strategies of retrieval for recent and for longer-term memories.
Retrieval. As is true for most other processes of learning, the process of retrieval may be affected by external stimulation. Cues for retrieval may be suggested by verbal communications to the learner. For example, in "jogging the memory" of a student who is trying to recall what specific gravity means, one might say "do you remember Archimedes?"
Sometimes, the external cue takes the form of reminding the learner of his previous encoding, as in the following example. High school students were asked to learn lists of words belonging to certain categories (four-footed animals, weapons, professions, etc.). The words themselves, corresponding to these categories, were such as cow, rat; bomb, cannon; engineer, lawyer. They were randomly arranged in lists of three different lengths, containing twelve, twenty-four, or forty-eight words. Learners were given the task of learning and remembering the words in the list. The words were read, and each was preceded by a category word, which the learners were told did not have to be remembered. Later, one group of learners recalled the words by being given "cues" for the categories, while another group was not given these cues. For the short lists of twelve words, providing cues made little difference in recall. For the forty-eight word lists, however, the category cues made a very large difference, on the average 74 percent (for the cued condition) to 32 percent (for those not cued). These results, then, show previously learned categories can function as cues to the retrieval of otherwise unrelated words. Retrieval cues appear to be most effective when they are introduced at the time learning first occurs.
Again, as in the case of coding, it must be remembered that the sophisticated learner supplies his own retrieval cues. As we shall see in the next chapter, an important goal of school learning is the development of an independent learner. Although it is important for the design of instruction to make suitable provision for external activation of the retrieval process, it is even more important for the learner to acquire strategies that enable him to do this himself. In order to encourage such development, however, a teacher needs to know "what is going on" in learning, and thereby to choose judiciously the communications he makes to the student.
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