Generate your own examples or explanations before studying provided ones

Before seeing a worked example or explanation, try to construct your own version — the effort and the mismatch strengthen learning.

Why it works

The generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978) shows that self-generated material is better retained than received material, independent of the error dimension. Combining generation with the errorful learning effect — generating your own example, then comparing it to a better one — produces encoding from multiple sources: generation effort, prediction error, and contrast-based learning. The comparison step is where the structural principles become salient.

How to do it

1. Before reading a provided example or explanation, write your best attempt at one.
2. Mark the points where you are uncertain.
3. Read the provided example and identify every place where yours differed.
4. For each difference, explain in one sentence why the provided version is better — that explanation is the core learning.

Evidence

The generation effect is one of the more established effects in memory research. Slamecka & Graf (1978) and many subsequent studies show generation advantage for retention. The extension to examples rather than single words is extrapolated from that literature and consistent with productive failure research (Kapur, 2016). Bertsch et al. (2007) meta-analyzed 86 comparisons and confirmed a robust overall generation advantage while identifying the boundary conditions (e.g., accuracy of generation, retention interval) that modulate its size. (observational)

Generation benefits require that the learner has enough prior knowledge to generate something; for complete novices, generation attempts may produce random responses that don’t engage the mechanism effectively.

Sources

• Slamecka & Graf (1978), The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory
• Slamecka, N. J., & Graf, P. (1978). The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 592-604.
• Bertsch, S., Pesta, B. J., Wiscott, R., & McDaniel, M. A. (2007). The generation effect: A meta-analytic review. Memory & Cognition, 35(2), 201-210.
• Kapur, M. (2016). Examining productive failure, productive success, unproductive failure, and unproductive success in learning. Educational Psychologist, 51(2), 289-299.
• Kapur, M. (2008). Productive failure. Cognition and Instruction, 26(3), 379-424.

Common mistake

Skipping the generation step and reading the example directly when under time pressure, sacrificing the primary encoding mechanism to save a few minutes.