Evocation effect on learning: what it is and how it works

Let's take a look at what the evocation effect on learning is and how we can harness its potential.

We have all been students and know how tedious it can be to study for an exam. It is normal to feel lazy when opening the book and going over the content that is about 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 do the occasional 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 the classic exams what they make us do is to remember what we have learned, exposing them in writing.

In the following we are going to find out what the effect of recall is on learning. and why this technique can be very useful when studying for an exam.

What is the effect of evocation on learning?

All kinds of study techniques exist. There are students who, in an almost obsessive way, write down every single word that the teacher says in the classroom. Others prefer to take the book and underline it with markers of all colors, each one for a different type of data.

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

All these practices involve varying 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 all these techniques have in common is that they review the given content, but do not practice remembering it, evoking it.but we do not practice remembering it, evoking it. When we read or make outlines we go back to the syllabus, but we are not making the cognitive effort to bring to our consciousness what we have supposedly learned, even though that is what we will have to do on the day of the exam.

Evocation should be part of studying. By practicing bringing back to our consciousness 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 state what is asked in it, are really evocation exercises rather than to demonstrate that we have obtained the knowledge. We may have read the lesson over and over again but it does us no good if on the day of the exam we draw a blank and are unable to retrieve the 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:

• Encoding: obtaining the information.
• Storage: storing 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, may result in the following processes and, very partially, can lead to the third. When we are in class or we read the subject for the first time, we perform the first process, that is, encoding. Naturally, this process will be better or worse depending on different factors, such as our arousal (state of alertness), how interesting we find the lesson or if we already knew something related to what we are learning at that moment.

Then we perform the second process, storage. This storage can be done in a very passive way such as reading and rereading the syllabus. We can also do it through outlines and summaries. It is not really wrong to say that the more you read, the more information is likely to be stored, but this is not a guarantee that we will remember it. If we were to compare encoding and storage with the computer world, the former would involve creating a new document and the latter would be simply storing it in the memory of the PC.

The problem with most of the techniques, to continue with the computer metaphor, is that they effectively involve creating that mental document and saving it somewhere in the memory of our brain, but we don't know where. We don't know in which folder to look for that document, or whether that folder is inside another folder. These techniques serve to create the documents, but not to establish the mental path we have to follow to get to those documents. In short, learning would mean creating the document, storing it safely and knowing how to retrieve it when necessary.

In relation to this same comparison we can point out that, on many occasions, forgetfulness or the feeling of forgetfulness is not because the stored information has disappeared, but because we are not able to retrieve it without clues. When we are at a computer and we do not know how to get to a document, what we do is to look for it in the search engine of programs and files, trusting that we will enter the keyword that will lead us to it.

However, our mind differs from a computer's memory at this point. While seeing or hearing a clue about the content we have reviewed may help us to remember it, this memory may be casual.. We are not recalling it per se, that is, we are not getting to the whole document, but rather we are remembering some ideas that have more or less stuck with us. Even so, in the exams we are not given too many clues and this is where we get stuck.

Taking an exam is like riding a bike

Most of us know how to ride a bike and more or less remember how we learned to ride it. At the beginning we rode on the vehicle with wheels to learn how to pedal. Later, those little wheels were removed and with several attempts, fears, loss of balance and support from our parents or other people close to us, we managed to handle the bike. All this is, in essence, the experience we have all had when we have ridden one of these things for the first time.

Let's imagine we meet someone who tells us that he or she didn't learn this way. Unlike us, he or she claims that he or she spent several weeks studying the mechanism of the bicycle, looking at the plans, the mechanism of the wheels, watching other people ride, and that one day he or she sat down on the vehicle and suddenly he or she was riding it. Listening to all this, we would think that he is pulling our leg, which is the safest thing to do. How is he going to learn to ride a bike without having practiced?

We can apply the same can be applied to writing exams. In the same way that we are not going to learn to ride a bicycle without having tried it first we will not be able to expose everything we are supposed to have learned on the day of the exam without having practiced it first. We need to have taken some time in our study sessions to try to practice recall, seeing how we remember without the need for both visual and auditory cues.

Classical tests are a good tool to see how well we are able to recall the content. They do not simply not simply assess encoding, i.e., having obtained the information, nor storage, i.e., having it in some memory, i.e., having it in some memory, i.e., having it in some memory.The tests do not simply assess encoding, i.e., having obtained the information, nor storage, i.e., having it somewhere in our memory, but also recall. If we only wanted to evaluate the first two processes, it would be enough to use multiple-choice tests with a statement and one of the answer alternatives literally as they appear in the book.

Evoking is better than reading

The reason few students practice recall is that they have a misconception of what learning is. It is common among students of all ages to believe that learning simply means passively absorbing content, hoping that on the test they will magically throw it up. As we have mentioned, they think that the more reading or outlining they do, the more they will have internalized the contents and, in turn, the easier it will be 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 a content, that is to say, to learn it. Practicing recall improves our ability to retrieve it and, therefore, improves the way in which we demonstrate that we know it. It has been shown 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 on the day of the exam.

Unwittingly advanced

As we mentioned, there are few students who practice recall intentionally. However, although they are still in the minority, there are quite a few who do practice it, albeit spontaneously and without being aware of the extent to which it reinforces their learning. They do it as a strategy to be sure that they know it and thus gain 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 so that they can pay more attention to it.

The reason most people 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 don't practice recall because, in doing so, we end up with a sense of frustration when we discover how many things we still don't know. when we discover how many things we still don't know, even though ironically this is a great advantage in our study, since it helps us avoid wasting time going over things we already know and focusing on what we are still unclear about.

It is because of this sense of frustration that the average student prefers to reread the lesson. In addition to the little cognitive effort involved in this task while we are looking at content that we have already encoded and somehow stored in our mind comes a sense of familiarity. When reading we recognize what we have already seen and have the false sense that we have learned it.This gives us a sense of calm, thinking that we are fully assimilating the content, which is rarely true.

This feeling of familiarity can be seen in students as soon as they finish an exam. When they hand it in, they leave the classroom and start talking to each other about what they have entered in a somewhat sadomasochistic act. It is not uncommon to see how one classmate is surprised when another says what he should have put on the exam, saying worriedly "But I knew that!". What has just happened is that he recognized what his partner had talked about, but at the time of the exam he could not conjure it up. It was in some obscure place in his mind, but he didn't know how to get to it.

Summary

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 in learning is the most beneficial of all, since it implies practicing the same thing that will be done on the day of the exam, that is, remembering without visual or auditory clues the content that is asked on that sheet of paper.

Reading, rereading, outlining, summarizing, underlining and so on can be useful, but they do not give us the certainty that what we are seeing at the moment we are doing the review we are going to know how to evoke it on the day of the exam. This is why evocation should be a technique that is always present in our study sessions, since it makes us complete the whole learning process: encoding, storing, recalling, recalling, and so forth.encoding, storage, recall. Moreover, 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.

Bibliographical references:

• Björk, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. En: J. Metcalfe y A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 185-206.
• Karpicke, J., y 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 practise 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. A. (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)¿Cómo aprendemos? Una aproximación científica al aprendizaje y la enseñanza. España, Graó.