Retrieval Practice

Retrieval practice is a learning technique where bringing information to mind with mental effort. This mental effort makes connetions, comparisons or predicitons as opposed to see all of them in front of you; in other words, when retrieve and bring information to mind, this mental challange produces durable long-term learning.

This technique is considered as one of the best ways to learn.It a process of bringing information to mind from your memory. In this learning method,you don’t need any material like book,notebook, internet etc. Instead, you should put effort into recalling information. According to this method,reviewing something over and over again is not as useful as forcing yourself to recall.Because,when you review what you already know, it makes you feel better and you can persuade yourself “Oh! I know this topic very well.” But, this is short-term learning. The magic of this technique is that it provides long-term learning.

As soon as you learn something- it doesn’t matter if it is too hard or too easy-,your brain starts to forget it.To avoid this situation, you should force yourself to recall it after learning and repeat it at weekly or montly periods.There are a bunch of ways to implement this technique.I will mention two of them.

Flash Cards

Flash cards method is the most known method in retrieval practice. In this approach, you may write the answers on one side of the card and write the question on the other side. When you see the question on the cards, you must give it a try to remember what the answer is.After a while, if you don’t find the answer you can look at the other side of the card. In this method, the most important part is that you must not look at the answer before trying to remember.What makes you better in learning is this effort you put.

Flashcards are more effective if you try this method at least three times. One of the significant advantages of flash cards is that there are so many applications you can use on your mobile phone.

Quizzes

Simple tests are one of the most straighforwad ways to practice this method. What matters the most is not looking at the information source while answering the questions.You can prepare questions for yourself or for a friend of yours. Or if you are teaching something, you can prepare quizzes for your students.It is a fun way to learn and to teach. You can find plenty of applications for preparing quizzes.

Learning is a life-long process. You can practice this method in every phase of your life. There is no doubt that it works for everyone. The only thing you should do is to build it in your daily routine and just keep going with patience without obsessing over doing it perfectly.

You can buy the template of this method from here