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.
American Psychological Association. (1994). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
2.
BalchW. R. (2010). Teaching experimental method using the feature-present/feature-absent effect. Teaching of Psychology, 37, 119–123. doi:10.1080/00986281003609090
3.
BeamanC. P.MortonJ. (2000). The separate but related origins of the recency effect and the modality effect in free recall. Cognition, 77, 59–65. doi:10.1016/S0010–0277(00)00107–4
4.
BenjaminL. T.NodineB. F.ErnstR. M.BroekerC. B. (1999). Activities handbook for the teaching of psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
5.
BuggJ. M.DeLoshE. L.McDanielM. A. (2008). Improving students’ study habits by demonstrating the mnemonic benefits of semantic processing. Teaching of Psychology, 35, 96–98. doi:10.1080/00986280801977519
6.
ChaffinR.HermannD. J. (1983). A classroom demonstration of depth of processing. Teaching of Psychology, 10, 105–107.
7.
ClumpM. A. (2006). An active learning classroom activity for the “cocktail party phenomenon.”Teaching of Psychology, 33, 51–53.
8.
CopelandD. E.ScottJ. R.HouskaJ. A. (2010). Computer-based demonstrations in cognitive psychology: Benefits and costs. Teaching of Psychology, 37, 141–145. doi:10.1080/00986281003626680
9.
ElliottL. J.RiceS.TrafimowD.MadsonL.HipshurM. F. (2010). Research participation versus classroom lecture: A comparison of student learning. Teaching of Psychology, 37, 129–131. doi:10.1080/00986281003626862
10.
ForsythD. R.WibberlyK. H. (1993). The self-reference effect: Demonstrating schematic processing in the classroom. Teaching of Psychology, 20, 237–238.
11.
KahanT. A.MathisK. M. (2007). Searching under cups for clues about memory: An online demonstration. Teaching of Psychology, 34, 124–128. doi:10.1080/00986280701293255
12.
KatzA. N. (1979). Demonstrating semantic memory in the teaching laboratory with a paper-and-pencil task. Teaching of Psychology, 6, 173–175.
13.
KelleyM. R. (2004). Demonstrating the Monty Hall dilemma. Teaching of Psychology, 31, 193–195.
14.
MerwinM. M. (2003). Forbidden words: A strategy for studying psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 30, 242–244.
15.
MiserandinoM. (1991). Memory and the seven dwarfs. Teaching of Psychology, 18, 169–171.
16.
MotesM. A.WiegmannD. A. (1999). Computerized cognition laboratory. Teaching of Psychology, 26, 62–65.
17.
PrullM. W.BanksW. P. (2005). Seeing the light: A classroom-sized pinhole camera demonstration for teaching vision. Teaching of Psychology, 32, 103–106. doi:10.1207/S15328023top3202_5
18.
ThiemanT. J. (1984). A classroom demonstration of encoding specificity. Teaching of Psychology, 11, 101–102.
