A Free-Recall Demonstration Versus a Lecture-Only Control

Abstract

On their first class day, introductory psychology students took a 14-question multiple-choice pretest on several principles of memory including primacy, recency, storage, retrieval, counterbalancing, and the free-recall method. I randomly preassigned students to come at one of two different times to the second class, 2 days later, when they either participated in a free-recall demonstration/debriefing or heard a lecture on comparable material. In the third class, five days later, they took a posttest identical to the pretest. On the posttest but not the pretest, students participating in the demonstration/debriefing significantly outperformed those hearing only the lecture.