Effect Of Evocation On Learning: What It Is And How It Works
We have all been students and we know how tedious it can be to have to study for an exam. It is normal to feel lazy when opening the book and reviewing the content that is going to be included, 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 are reading and rereading and making 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 classic exams what they make us do is remember what we have learned, presenting it in writing.
Next Let’s discover what the effect of evocation is on learning and why this technique can be very useful when studying for an exam.
There are all kinds of study techniques. There are students who, almost obsessively, write down each of the words 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-its on the pages to have a quick note of what that lesson is about. However, the vast majority prefer to simply read the syllabus, trusting that the more we read it, the more it will be retained in our memory.
All of these practices involve different degrees of effort. It is clear that making summaries and outlines are more complex tasks than just reading and rereading over and over again. But what What all these techniques have in common is that they review the given content, but its memory, its evocation, is not practiced. When we read or make outlines we look at the syllabus again, but we are not making the cognitive effort involved in bringing 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 the study. By practicing returning to our awareness of what we have seen in class or what we read in books, we are truly preparing ourselves for exam day Traditional exams, that is, those in which we are presented with a statement in which we have to explain what is asked in it, are really exercises of evocation rather than to demonstrate that we have obtained knowledge. We may have read the lesson over and over again, but it is of no use to us if on the day of the exam we are left blank and are not able to retrieve that information.
How do we learn?
To say that we have learned class content, it is necessary that the following three processes have occurred:
The vast majority of student internships remain in the first two processes and, very partially, they can give rise to the third. When we are in class or read the topic for the first time, we carry out the first process, that is, coding. Naturally, this process will occur in a better or worse way based on different factors, such as our arousal (state of alert), how interesting the lesson seems to us or if we already knew something related to what we are learning at that moment.
Then we carry out the second process, storage. We can do this storage in a very passive way, such as reading and rereading the syllabus. We can also do it through diagrams and summaries. It really isn’t entirely wrong to say that the more readings, the more likely it is that more information will be stored, but this is no guarantee that we will remember it. If we were to compare encoding and storage with the computer world, the first would involve creating a new document and the second would simply be saving it in the PC memory.
The problem with most techniques, continuing with the computer metaphor, is that they effectively involve creating that mental document and save it somewhere in our brain’s memory, but we don’t know where. We do not know in which folder to look for that document, nor if that folder is inside another folder. These techniques serve to create documents, but not to establish the mental path that we have to take to reach such documents. In short, learning would mean creating the document, keeping it safe and knowing how to retrieve it when necessary.
In relation to this same comparison we can highlight that, on many occasions, forgetting or the feeling of it is not due to the stored information having disappeared, but rather because we are not able to recover it without clues. When we are on a computer and we don’t know how to get to a document, what we do is search the program and file search engine itself, trusting that we will enter the keyword that it gives us.
However, our mind is different from a computer’s memory at this point. Although seeing or hearing a clue about the content we have reviewed can help us remember it, this memory can be accidental We are not evoking it in itself, that is, we are not reaching the entire 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 caught.
Taking an exam is like riding a bicycle
Most of us know how to ride a bicycle and we remember more or less how we learned to ride it. At first we got on the vehicle with training wheels to learn to pedal. Later, they took off those small wheels and with several attempts, fears, loss of balance and support from our parents or other loved ones we managed to handle the bicycle. All this is, in essence, the experience that we have all had when we rode one of these things for the first time.
Let’s imagine that we meet someone who tells us that he or she didn’t learn that way. Unlike us, he claims that he spent several weeks studying the mechanism of the bicycle, looking at its plans, the mechanism of the wheels, watching other people ride and that, one day, he sat on top of the vehicle and, suddenly, he was already He was moving with her. Hearing all this we would think that she is kidding us, which is the safest thing to do. How is she going to learn to ride a bike without having practiced?
This same We can apply it to writing exams In the same way that we are not going to learn to ride a bicycle without having tried first, we will not be able to present everything we are supposed to have learned on the day of the exam without having first practiced it. It is necessary that we have taken time in our study sessions to try to practice evocation, seeing how we remember without the need for both visual and auditory cues.
Classic exams are a good tool to see to what extent we are able to evoke the content. With them The coding, that is, having obtained the information, is not simply evaluated, nor the storage, that is, having it somewhere in our memory, but also the evocation. If we only wanted to evaluate the first two processes, it would be enough to use multiple choice exams whose statement and one of the answer alternatives were written literally as they appear in the book.
Evoke better than read
The reason why few students practice evocation is that they have the wrong idea of what learning is. It is common to see among students of all ages that they believe that learning simply means passively absorbing the content, hoping that they will magically throw it up on the exam. As we have mentioned, they think that The more readings or diagrams they do, the more they will internalize the content and, in turn, the easier they will be able to bring him back, which is not really the case.
During the last decades, the extent to which practicing evocation allows us to better assimilate content, that is, learn it, has been studied. Practicing evocation improves our ability to recover it and, therefore, improves the way we show that we know it. It has been seen 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 the day of the exam.
Advantaged without knowing it
As we mentioned, there are few students who practice evocation intentionally. However, although they are still a minority, there are many who do practice it, although spontaneously and without being aware of the extent to which this reinforces their learning. They do it as a strategy to be sure that they know and, thus, gain a bit of 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 which content they are weakest so that they can pay more attention to it.
The reason why 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 do not practice evocation because, by doing so, we end up with a feeling of frustration by discovering how many things we still don’t know, although ironically this is a great advantage in our study, since it helps us avoid wasting time reviewing things we already know and focusing on what we are still not clear about.
It is because of this feeling of frustration that average students prefer to reread the lesson. In addition to the little cognitive effort that this task implies, while we are viewing the content that we have already encoded and, in some way, stored in our mind, we get a feeling of familiarity. When reading we recognize what we have already seen and we have the false feeling that we have learned it giving us a feeling of calm thinking that we are fully assimilating the contents, which is rarely true.
We can see this feeling of familiarity in students as soon as they finish an exam. When they hand it in, they leave the classroom and begin to talk among themselves about what has become a somewhat sadomasochistic act. It is not uncommon to see how a classmate is surprised when another says what he should have put on the exam, saying worriedly “But I knew that!” What just happened is that he recognized what his classmate was talking about, but at the time of the exam he was unable to recall it. It was somewhere dark in his mind, but he couldn’t reach 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 on learning is the most beneficial of all, since it involves 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 of us on that sheet. of paper.
Reading, rereading, making outlines, summaries, 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 will know how to evoke on the day of the exam. This is why the evocation It should be a technique that is always present in our study sessions, since it makes us complete the entire learning process: encoding, storage, evocation. Furthermore, 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.
