week 5 learning from errors

Question 1

what is a laypersons view

Answer 1

the perspective or understanding of someone who does not have specialized knowledge or expertise in a particular field or subject

avoid errors in high-stakes situations, opinions vary for low stakes situations

Question 2

what do traditional theorists say about errors

Answer 2

they’re harmful, emphasizing errorless learning approaches.
- erroneous answers will become stronger in memory -> more likely to be repeated

Question 3

what is the generation effect

Answer 3

information generated when actively reading is better remembered than passively reading it eg k-tt-en is more remembered than ‘kitten’

Question 4

who came up with pretesting effect

Answer 4

kornell et al 2009

Question 5

what is the pretesting effect

Answer 5

taking a test on information before learning it can improve learning outcomes

Question 6

describe procedure of kornell et al 2009 study into the pretesting effect

Answer 6

• ptsp studied weakly related work pairs eg pond -?
• before showing correct answers, ptsp asked to guess the second word
• pretest condition: ptsp guessed answers without prior exposure to correct words. control condition: ptsp studied word pairs directly without guessing

Question 7

describe results of kornell et al 2009 study into the pretesting effect

Answer 7

• pretesting enhanced learning even when guesses incorrect
• correct guesses were removed from dataset to focus on impact of incorrect guesses
• pretesting outperformed simple studying in retention tests

Question 8

what is the search set theory

Answer 8

• guessing activates related concepts eg frog - water
• partial activation of the correct answer allows it to be encoded more effectively when it is revealed

Question 9

what did Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2012 find

Answer 9

Benefits of search set theory depend on relatedness of the pretest content

Question 10

what is the hypercorrection effect

Answer 10

high-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected and remembered after feedback compared to low-confidence errors

Question 11

summarise Butterfield and Metcalfe (2001) study into the hypercorrection effect

Answer 11

-ptsp answered general knowledge questions and rated their confidence in each answer
- 5 min retention interval and cued recall final test
- high confidence errors were more likely to be corrected on a later test compared to low-confidence errors.

Question 12

summarise Butterfield and Metcalfe (2006) study

Answer 12

ptsp answered questions and rated condense, feedback given.
- had to do secondary task:detecting soft tones
- in high confidence errors: Participants were more surprised when they got these wrong.
They focused so much on the feedback that they often missed the soft tones during the secondary task.

Question 13

What is a key difference between procedures used to demonstrate the backward testing effect and the pretesting effect?

Answer 13

The procedure used to demonstrate the backward testing effect includes an initial study phase, whereas the procedure for the pretesting effect does not.

Question 14

what were the findings of smith et al stress study?

Answer 14

Smith et al. (2016) gave participants a final recall test either 5 or 20 minutes after the stress/control task. After 20 minutes, stress induction also impaired recall, but only for participants who had restudied rather than engaged with retrieval practice.

Question 15

what did seabrooke, Mitchell et al 2019 find

Answer 15

pretesting improved peoples motivation to learn the information that they were pretesting on, relative to simply studying the information