7 Retrieval strategies

So far, you have looked at how important it is to use effective strategies to encode information into your long-term memory. It is equally important to use effective strategies to retrieve information from your long-term memory, and in fact, some of the strategies we have just looked at also help with retrieving of information from your long-term memory. So for instance, when you use spaced repetition, it is helping you to register new words into your long-term memory, but it is also helping you remember those words that you already know. Indeed, spacing is one of the most useful ways to retrieve the knowledge you have in your long-term memory so that you can use it. The other is self-testing.

Read the following post on retrieval practice from The Learning Scientists, a group of cognitive psychological scientists, whose aim is to make scientific research on learning more accessible to students, teachers and other educators.