Ten Study Methods That Help You Remember: Research You Can Use for Vocabulary

Some students kept reading foreign language words after they had answered them correctly once. Others only kept being tested on them. On a later test, continued reading showed no effect, and the students who kept being tested showed a large effect. That is from an experiment by Karpicke and Roediger, published in Science in 2008. What is more, the students’ own predictions of their scores were unrelated to their actual scores.

Brain Mondo has published a video that picks ten memory studies like this one and puts them in order: before learning, while learning, after learning, and review. Each method has one paper as its source. Most are experiments on remembering foreign language words, word lists and facts. In this post I go through the ten papers from the video, together with the conditions of each experiment and some cautions for reading them.

Video: Ten study methods that boost memory, also useful for memorising English words (Japanese)

The video is in Japanese.

Before learning

1. Get out of breath before memorising

Twenty-seven healthy people tried three conditions in turn: all-out sprints, light running, and simply resting (Winter and colleagues, 2007, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory). Right afterwards they learned new words. After the sprints, they learned 20 percent faster than in the other two conditions.

This is a small study of 27 people. What got faster was the speed of learning. It does not mean that exercise lets you remember anything. Exercise and memory are also covered in the post on a study of memory after 10 minutes of light exercise.

While learning

2. Read only some of the words aloud

One study compared reading words aloud with reading them silently, across eight experiments (MacLeod and colleagues, 2010). The words remembered better later were the ones read aloud. This is called the “production effect”.

The conditions are what matter. The effect appeared when the same person read only some of the words in a list aloud. The authors explain that the words read aloud stand out from the other words, and that this becomes a cue when recalling them. If you read everything aloud, no word stands out.

3. Draw it instead of copying it out

One study, across seven experiments, showed people words one at a time and compared drawing a picture of each word with writing the word out (Wammes and colleagues, 2016). The words recalled better later were the ones that had been drawn. The effect remained when the drawing time was shortened and when the number of words was increased.

The authors think that drawing brings meaning, appearance and hand movement together into a single memory.

4. Think for yourself before looking at the answer

There is an analysis that combined 86 studies (Bertsch and colleagues, 2007, Memory & Cognition). For example, people remembered words of similar meaning better when they came up with them themselves than when they just read them. This is called the “generation effect”, and overall the difference was close to half a standard deviation.

The size of the effect varied a good deal with the conditions, though. It cannot be said that every kind of material becomes easier to remember by the same amount.

5. Place things along a route you know well

This is the “method of loci”, a way of remembering that has been used for thousands of years. You picture the things you want to remember and place them at points along a route you know well, then recall them later by following the route. An analysis that combined 13 experiments found an effect of medium size (Twomey and Kroneisen, 2021).

On the other hand, most of the original studies did not properly report how participants were assigned to groups, and the analysis points out a high risk of bias. Many of the studies were carried out at universities. The authors describe the result as good initial support.

6. Words can be studied in blocks, without mixing

Studying different kinds of things mixed together is called “interleaving”. An analysis that combined 59 studies found a medium effect overall, and a particularly large one for material learned by looking, such as paintings (Brunmair and Richter, 2019, Psychological Bulletin).

In studies that used words, however, studying them in blocks gave better results than mixing. The effect of mixing was large when the kinds being learned were very similar to each other and hard to tell apart. The authors write that interleaving should be used with caution for expository texts and words.

After learning

7. A short nap after learning

In one experiment, people learned 30 words and then spent the next 60 minutes in one of three ways: staying awake, taking a short nap of 6 minutes or less on average, or taking a longer nap (Lahl and colleagues, 2008, Journal of Sleep Research). The two groups that napped recalled the words better. The long nap gave an even better result than the short nap.

Since even about 6 minutes of sleep made a difference, the authors think that falling asleep itself may trigger the process that consolidates memory.

Review

8. Keep testing after a correct answer

This is the experiment by Karpicke and Roediger from the opening. Students learned foreign language words. Once a word had been answered correctly, it was put into one of several conditions, such as: keep reading it, keep being tested on it only, or stop both. On a later test, continued reading showed no effect, and continued testing had a large effect.

Once you can answer something, it feels as if you have learned it. But the students’ predictions were unrelated to their actual scores. The sense of having learned something is not very reliable. The effect of recalling is covered in detail in the post on the testing effect.

9. Learn at night and review in the morning

Forty people practised foreign language words until they got every one right, and then relearned them 12 hours later (Mazza and colleagues, 2016, Psychological Science). Half of them learned in the morning and reviewed that evening. The other half learned in the evening, slept, and reviewed the next morning.

The group with sleep in between needed half as much practice at review. On tests one week later and six months later, they also remembered much better. The paper ends by saying that sleeping after learning is a good strategy, but sleeping between two learning sessions is a better one.

10. Set the review gap by how far away the test is

More than 1,350 people learned a set of facts, reviewed them after a gap of up to three and a half months, and then took a test up to one year later (Cepeda and colleagues, 2008, Psychological Science). As the gap before the review was widened, scores first went up, and then went down little by little when the gap became too wide.

The best gap changes with how far away the test is. If the test is one week away, it is about 20 to 40 percent of that, which means about a day and a half to three days. If the test is one year away, it is about 5 to 10 percent of that, which means three weeks to a little over a month. The longer you want to remember something, the longer the gap before reviewing it.

Cautions for reading

Most of the ten are experiments on remembering foreign language words, word lists and short facts. They are not studies of the ability to read or speak English as such.

The studies are not equally strong, either. The first is an experiment with 27 people and the ninth with 40. The fourth, fifth and sixth are analyses combining several studies, but the size of the effect differs with the conditions, and a risk of bias has been pointed out for the fifth. The second and sixth are also examples where doing it the wrong way gives no effect, or the opposite one.

All of them are results under the conditions of an experiment. Whether a method suits you is best checked by trying it.

Using it in daily life

The video suggests trying just one of them first. For study with a vocabulary book, they can be combined in ways like these.

• Cover the translation and think for yourself first. This uses the fourth and eighth methods together. Do not remove the words you could answer from the book. Recall them a few more times.
• Read aloud, or draw, only the words that are hard to remember. There is no need to do it for all of them. Doing it for only some is in fact closer to the conditions of the second study.
• Learn at night, and once more the next morning. Split it into 10 minutes before bed and 10 minutes in the morning. For reviews after that, set the gap by the number of days until the test.

Brain Mondo introduces research-based stories about the brain, in top-ten videos and short videos. BrainDojo is an app for training calculation, memory, attention and more in a few minutes a day. If you open it for a few minutes at night and again the next morning, the ninth method, “once more, with sleep in between”, can become a daily habit.

References

• Winter B, Breitenstein C, Mooren FC, et al. High impact running improves learning. Neurobiol Learn Mem. 2007;87(4):597-609.
• MacLeod CM, Gopie N, Hourihan KL, Neary KR, Ozubko JD. The production effect: delineation of a phenomenon. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2010;36(3):671-685.
• Wammes JD, Meade ME, Fernandes MA. The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. Q J Exp Psychol. 2016;69(9):1752-1776.
• Bertsch S, Pesta BJ, Wiscott R, McDaniel MA. The generation effect: a meta-analytic review. Mem Cognit. 2007;35(2):201-210.
• Twomey C, Kroneisen M. The effectiveness of the loci method as a mnemonic device: Meta-analysis. Q J Exp Psychol. 2021;74(8):1317-1326.
• Brunmair M, Richter T. Similarity matters: A meta-analysis of interleaved learning and its moderators. Psychol Bull. 2019;145(11):1029-1052.
• Lahl O, Wispel C, Willigens B, Pietrowsky R. An ultra short episode of sleep is sufficient to promote declarative memory performance. J Sleep Res. 2008;17(1):3-10.
• Karpicke JD, Roediger HL. The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science. 2008;319(5865):966-968.
• Mazza S, Gerbier E, Gustin MP, et al. Relearn faster and retain longer. Psychol Sci. 2016;27(10):1321-1330.
• Cepeda NJ, Vul E, Rohrer D, Wixted JT, Pashler H. Spacing effects in learning: a temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychol Sci. 2008;19(11):1095-1102.