Developmental psychology.pdf

252 Learning and Information Processing
Figure 9.17
Overlearning and Recall. Recall
improved with overlearning; without
it, recall was almost negligible after
four days (Krueger, 1929).
One day
Four days
Time interval
Fourteen days
"In my senior year in high school
a teacher expected us to memorize
several French poems. One poem
especially stands out in my
mind as it was the longest one
(approximately 15 stanzas), and I
spent the most time on it. I have
forgotten the title, yet I can
remember and recite the first
stanza perfectly. However, my
memory of what comes after this
first stanza is very cloudy.
When I set about memorizing
this poem I would start from the
beginning and memorize it in order
by stanza. Every time I would start
with the first stanza. Thus, I went
over it considerably more than the
middle or end stanzas. I think I
overlearned the first stanza by
going over it so many times. Thus, I
have been "resistant to forgetting"
this one for over a year and a half.
Importance of Overlearning The significance of motivation is also readily evident
in overlearning, which means learning a task beyond the point at which it has just been
mastered. The person instead learns the material "forward and backward." The value
of this procedure was illustrated in an experiment in which adults learned lists of words
beyond the criterion of one perfect recall. Having half again as many practice trials
was designated 50 percent overlearning; having twice as many was 100 percent
overlearning. When these groups were compared with a third group that engaged in
no additional practice trials, the results showed a distinct advantage to both amounts
of overlearning (Figure 9.17).*
The idea of overlearning is misleading, however, because it suggests that there
has been too much practice. The highly motivated learner almost always passes beyond
the point of initial mastery but has not learned the task too well.
The almost perfect retention of some motor skills, such as riding a bicycle,
buttoning clothes, and eating with utensils, has led some people to suppose that motor
skills are better retained than verbal skills, but this conception seems false. When predominantly
verbal activities and predominantly motor activities are practiced equally,
motor skills are no better remembered than verbal ones (McGeoch & Melton, 1929;
Van Tilborg, 1936). A problem in most of these experiments, however, is equating the
tasks for level of difficulty (Figure 9.18).
When Benjamin Burtt was 14 years of age, ready and able to cooperate in his
father's work, he began to recite some of the selections spontaneously, when he was
out walking, riding, or even swimming. His father disliked this apparently innocent
pastime because it involved "unfair" practice of certain passages, thereby disrupting
the experiment. But at least the boy was motivated.
Mnemonic Devices
In addition to motivation, certain memory techniques will also help. Hence we close
with mnemonic devices, which are systems or brief methods designed to improve memory,
and these provide a useful summary of our prior discussions. But first, a comment
about cueing.
Need for Cues A cue is a signal for some particular action, and in memory it serves
as a means for retrieval of stored information. After taking a test, a student may say
that he knew the material but was unable to recall it. In other words, there was storage
but no retrieval. The student has experienced retrieval failure. In studying for an exam,