Effect of evocation on learning: what it is and how it works

We have all been students and we know how tedious it can be to study for an exam. It is normal to feel lazy when opening the book and reviewing the content that is going to enter, since we want to dedicate this time to more fun things.

Among the classic techniques that we have all used at some time to memorize the syllabus we have to read and reread and make some other outline and summary. We think that the more times we have seen it, the more we will retain it.

But, what if instead of reading and rereading we practice remembering the content? After all, in classic exams what they make us do is remember what we have learned, exposing them in writing.

Then let's find out what is the effect of evocation on learning and why this technique can be most useful when studying for an exam.

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What is the effect of evocation on learning?

There are all kinds of study techniques. There are students who, almost obsessively, write down each of the words that the teacher says in the classroom. Others prefer to take the book and underline it with markers of all colors, each for a different type of data.

It is also common for students to make outlines and post it on the pages to get a quick note of what that lesson is about. However, the vast majority prefer to simply read the agenda, trusting that the more readings, the more it will be retained in our memory.

All of these practices involve different degrees of effort. It is clear that summarizing and outlining are more complex tasks than just reading and rereading over and over again. But what All these techniques have in common is that it reviews the given content, but its remembrance, its evocation is not practiced. When we read or make diagrams we see the agenda again, but we are not making the cognitive effort that involves bringing to our conscience what, supposedly, we have learned, although that is what we will have to do on the day of the exam.

Evocation should be part of the study. By practicing the return to our consciousness of what we have seen in class or what we have read in books we are really preparing ourselves for the day of the exam. Traditional exams, that is, those in which we are presented with a statement in which we have to expose what is asked in it are really exercises in evocation rather than to show that we have obtained the knowledge. We may have read the lesson over and over again but it is useless if on the day of the exam we go blank and we are not able to retrieve that information.

How do we learn?

To say that we have learned a class content, it is necessary that the following three processes have taken place:

• Coding: get the information.
• Storage: save the information.
• Evocation: being able to retrieve it, with or without clues.

The vast majority of student practices remain in the first two processes and, very partially, they can give rise to the third. When we are in class or we read the subject for the first time, we carry out the first process, that is, the coding process. Naturally, this process will take place in a better or worse way based on different factors, such as our arousal (state of alert), how interesting the lesson seems to us or if we already knew something related to what we are learning in that moment.

Then we carry out the second process, storage. We can do this storage in a very passive way, as it would be by reading and rereading the syllabus. We can also do it through diagrams and summaries. It really is not entirely wrong to say that the more readings the more information is likely to be stored, but this is not a guarantee that we will remember it. If we compare encoding and storage with the computer world, the first would involve creating a new document and the second would simply be saving it in the memory of the PC.

The problem with most techniques, continuing with the computer metaphor, is that they effectively involve creating that mental document and save it somewhere in the memory of our brain, but we don't know where. We do not know in which folder to look for that document, or if that folder is inside another folder. These techniques serve to create the documents, but not to establish the mental path that we have to do to reach such documents. In short, learning would be to create the document, keep it safely and know how to recover it when necessary.

In relation to this same comparison we can highlight that, on many occasions, forgetting or the feeling of It is not because the stored information has disappeared, but because we are not able to recover it without tracks. When we are on a computer and we don't know how to get to a document, what we do is look for the the program and file search engine itself, trusting that we will put the keyword that gives us he.

However, our mind differs from computer memory at this point. Although seeing or hearing a clue about the content that we have reviewed can help us remember it, this memory can be accidental. We are not evoking it in itself, that is, we are not reaching the full document, but rather we are remembering some ideas that more or less have remained more marked. Even so, in the exams we are not given too many clues and this is where we get caught.

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Taking an exam is like riding a bicycle

Most of us know how to ride a bicycle and we remember more or less how we learned to ride it. At the beginning we would get on the vehicle with training wheels to learn to pedal. Later, those small wheels were removed and with several attempts, fears, loss of balance and support from our parents or other close friends, we managed to ride the bicycle. All of this is, in essence, the experience we've all had when we first rode one of these junk.

Let's imagine we meet someone who tells us that he or she did not learn that way. Unlike us, he assures that he spent several weeks studying the mechanism of the bicycle, seeing his plans, the mechanism of the wheels, watching other people ride and that, one day, he sat on top of the vehicle and, suddenly, he was already moving with her. Hearing all this we would think that she is teasing us, which is the safest thing to do. How is she going to learn to ride a bike without practicing?

This same we can apply it to writing tests. In the same way that we are not going to learn to ride a bicycle without having tried before, no we will be able to expose everything that we are supposed to have learned on the day of the exam without first having it practiced. It is necessary that we have taken some time in our study sessions to try to practice evocation, seeing how we remember without the need for both visual and auditory cues.

The classic exams are a good tool to see to what extent we are able to evoke the content. With them coding, that is, having obtained the information, or storage is not simply evaluated, that is, to have it somewhere in our memory, but also to evoke it. If we only wanted to evaluate the first two processes, it would be enough to use multiple choice tests whose statement and one of the answer alternatives were put literally as they appear in the book.

Evoke better than read

The reason so few students practice evocation is that they have the wrong idea of ​​what learning is. It is common for students of all ages to see that learning simply means absorbing content passively, hoping that they will magically vomit it up on the exam. As we mentioned, they think that the more readings or schemes do more they will have internalized the content and, in turn, it will be easier for them to bring it back, which is not really the case.

During the last decades, it has been studied to what extent practicing evocation allows us to better assimilate content, that is, to learn it. Practicing evocation improves our ability to retrieve it and therefore improves the way we show that we know it. It has been seen that If after a classic study session (reading the content or paying attention in class) we test our memory instead of rereading the content, better results are obtained the day of the exam.

Outplayed without knowing it

As we mentioned, there are few students who practice evocation intentionally. However, although they are still a minority, not a few do practice it, albeit spontaneously and without being aware of the extent to which this reinforces their learning. They do it as a strategy to be sure that they know it and, thus, gain a bit of a sense of calm. They do not know that by doing this they are practicing for the day of the exam and, in addition, they find out what content is weaker in order to pay more attention to them.

The reason why most of us do not practice evocation when studying has to do with our motivations and self-esteem, even though it is very profitable in the long run. We do not practice evocation because, in doing so, we end up with a feeling of frustration discovering how many things we still do not know, although ironically this is a great advantage in our study, since it helps us avoid wasting time reviewing things we already know and focusing on what we do not yet have Sure.

It is because of this feeling of frustration that average students prefer to reread the lesson. In addition to the little cognitive effort involved in this task while we are viewing the content that is already we have encoded and, somehow, stored in our mind comes a feeling of familiarity. By reading we recognize what we have already seen and have the false feeling that we have learned it, giving us a feeling of calm thinking that we are fully assimilating the contents, which is rarely true.

We can see this feeling of familiarity in students as soon as they finish an exam. Upon handing it in, they leave the classroom and begin to talk among themselves about what has become a somewhat sadomasochistic act. It is not uncommon to see how a classmate is surprised when another says what he should have put on the test, saying with concern "But I did know!" What has just happened is that he has recognized what his partner has talked about, but at the time of the examination he has not been able to evoke it. It was in some dark place in his mind, but it has not been able to reach him.

Resume

There are many study techniques used in classrooms today. Each of them involves investing different cognitive effort, time and resources. However, the effect of evocation on learning is the most beneficial of all, since it involves practicing the same as It will be done on the day of the exam, that is, remembering without visual or auditory clues the content that is asked in that worksheet paper.

Reading, rereading, outlining, summarizing, underlining, and so on can be helpful, but they don't give us the certainty that what we are seeing at the time we are doing the review we are going to know how to evoke the day of exam. This is why the evocation It should be a technique that is always present in our study sessions, since it makes us complete the entire learning process: encoding, storage, evocation. In addition, it allows us to see what we have not yet learned, since if we do not know how to remember it now, we will not know how to remember it on the day of the exam.

Bibliographic references:

• Björk, R. TO. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In: J. Metcalfe and A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 185-206.
• Karpicke, J., and Roediger, H. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966-968.
• Karpicke, et al., (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practice retrieval when they study on their own? Memory, 17 (4), 471-479.
• Karpicke, J. (2012). Retrieval-based learning: Active retrieval promotes meaningful learning. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21 (3) 157-163.
• Rowland, C. TO. (2014). The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: A meta-analytic review of the testing effect. Psychological Bulletin, 140, 1432-63.
• Ruiz-Martin, H. (2020) How do we learn? A scientific approach to learning and teaching. Spain, Graó.