Statistics homework

Sharing Ideas on the Teaching of Psychology

Douglas A. Bernstein

University of South Florida

University of Southampton

MEMORY: DEMONSTRATION OF DEPTH OF PROCESSING AND MEMORY1

This demonstration can help your students appreciate the relationship between the depth to which information is processed and the likelihood that it will be encoded in and retrieved from long-term memory. For best results, do the demonstration before describing the effect.

Read a list of words after instructing half the class to count or estimate the number of vowels in the words or to rate each item listed, on a 1-5 scale, in terms of its value to a person stranded on a desert island. (The differing instructions can be given via differing overhead transparencies shown to each half of the class): Here is a sample word list:

UMBRELLA, GASOLINE, ORCHESTRA, YACHT, HAMMER, DIAMOND, UNIVERSITY, MACARONI, EYEGLASSES, GARDEN, UNDERWEAR, NEWSPAPER, ALCOHOL, BOUQUET, MICROSCOPE, CAMOUFLAGE, POLLUTION, RESTAURANT, INSECT, ELEPHANT, SULPHUR, LEMONADE, MOSQUITO, BOTTLE.

To displace from short-term memory the words in the latter part of the list, ask the students spend about 30 seconds performing a distracting task, such as writing their name, address, phone number, major, and social security number.

Now give the students one minute to write down as many words from the list as they can recall. Retention scores from those who processed the words superficially (by counting or estimating vowels) should be much lower than those from students who processed the information more deeply (by thinking about, and possibly visualizing, the usefulness of each item in a particular situation.

You may want to relate the results of this demonstration to the advice given in study skills courses to avoid study methods that process course material superficially (e.g. simply reading or underlining) in favor of deeper processing tasks such as outlining chapters, writing examples of the relationship between new material and that already read, or writing test questions about the material.

1 This demonstration was created by Tom Thieman, a former Illinois graduate student now at the College of St. Catherine.