Cognitive: Week 1

• A few lab terms:
• Dependent Variable: measures the behavior that reflects the effects of the independent variable. 
• Independent Variable: factor whose levels are selected by the experimenter in order to determine the effect of the D.V. 
• Within Subjects Design: (controls for individual differences) repeated measure design; all subjects receive all levels. Each subject serves in each treatment. An issue here may be carry-over effects from prior experience. 
• Between Subjects Design: (may not have equivalent groups) different groups receive different levels of the same independent variable.
• Counterbalancing: systematic technique used to distribute carry-over effects so they won't be confounded with the experimental treatments.
• Confounding: presence of extraneous variables that vary systematically with the independent variable; varying together.
• Article about memory retrieval and learning:
• What is typically assumed about memory and retrieval?
• the assumption is that more studying means more learning, and retrieval isn't about learning, its just a tool to test learning, not a learning process itself.
• "enhancing the process when students encode knowledge" has been the focus and how to make that process, not a focus on retrieval.
• the author says no, retrieval plays a role in learning.
• Why would that be?
• because each act of retrieval changes the memory. The act of reconstruction. Knowledge bust be considered an essential to the process of learning.
• It may be modified every time you retrieve information. Maybe you make inferences about what might have been present.
• What are elaborative study tasks?
• And example is concept mapping - it requires students to enrich the material they are studying and encode meaningful relationships. Here, you link new info into things you already know.
• The way retrieval has been studied did not take into account the complex learning environment that actually occurs. There was no external validity in this approach... it wasn't generalizable.
• This study compares retrieval learning and concept mapping.
• What was the design of the first experiment?
• Between subjects design
• 4 groups: study once, study more, study then concept map, and study with retrieval practice.
• 20 participants per group.
• initially, the learning for concept mapping and retrieval was about the same.
• metacognition: thinking about learning; the participants asked participants how much they thought they had learned, and they thought they had leaned the most with repeated study, and the least with retrieval practice.
• their predictions were wrong... retrieval was the highest.
• What issues were addressed in the 2nd experiment?
• different knowledge structures: like remembering a sequence vs. remembering a whole concept.
• they wanted to know, are retrieval methods as effective for both sequence vs. enumeration texts?
• this time, they used a within subjects design to see if retrieval could work reliably for each individual.
• half of the participants did a short answer test as the final test, and half did concept mapping.
• Interestingly, retrieval learning did better than concept mapping on making concepts maps! In all cases, retrieval strategies worked as the best strategy for retaining information.