Remembering things - Total Recall

Remembering things

What do you prefer, multiple choice exams or exams where you have to write answers to questions?

If you are like me, you prefer multiple choice. Not the hard ones with trick questions and answers, the simple ones.

But why is that?

Because they are easier.

Why is that?

Instinctively you might know that there is a difference between recognising something and having to recall it from scratch.

This is true. In fact, there are three ways that we can measure how someone ‘remembers’ something. These are recall, recognition and relearning (Biggs, 1982).

This week we look at recall

 

What is Recall?

When most people talk about remembering, they usually are referring to recall.

Recalling is searching you memory and then producing information with it. It is the type of memory used in those exams where you have to write answers to questions. These are questions like, “write down the types of long-term memory you read about in the articles.”. Just joking. While I hope you find this blog interesting and informative, I am not going to test you on the content!

Aided Recall

What if I helped you out. Like, a type of long-term memory is “sem….

You might be able to finish off “semantic memory”.

This is called ‘aided recall” for fairly obvious reasons.

There are a few ways in which recall is studied.

Photo by tagphoto/iStock / Getty Images
Photo by tagphoto/iStock / Getty Images

Free Recall

The first is called free-recall.

Not because it doesn’t cost anything but because there are no restrictions.

Just try to remember a list and then see how many you can recall in any order.

You do this when you do shopping lists. It doesn’t matter what order you remember the in (unless you love to make your trips to the shops ‘efficient’).

Photo by AnthonyRosenberg/iStock / Getty Images
Photo by AnthonyRosenberg/iStock / Getty Images

Serial Learning 

For those times that order does matter, though, this is called ‘serial learning’.

Photo by maxsattana/iStock / Getty Images
Photo by maxsattana/iStock / Getty Images

 

Conclusion

There are three ways that we can measure how someone ‘remembers’ something. These are recall, recognition and relearning. Recalling is searching you memory and then producing information with it. It is the type of memory used in those exams where you have to write answers to questions. 

Next week we will look at recognition

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