Now that I’m in college some things had to change. I had to start being more responsible in certain ways; for instance, remembering to bring my key everywhere that I go. I also have to make sure that I get to my tests and remember to do my homework. But one thing that I noticed was that my procrastination continues to be a problem. When it comes to exams, it’s arguably one of the most difficult things to get out of your regular routine to study the material. This is why I often times found and now continue to find myself cramming for tests the night before, which isn’t such a rare thing for college students. Many students find themselves due to their busy schedules leaving the studying until the last minute. But research has shown time and time again that cramming is actually the worst thing you could do and that it actually has more negative effects towards academic and personal performance. I was able to find studies were able to explain why cramming is so bad.
One study that I found discussed something that two researchers by the names of Glanzer and Cunitz had found. They worked off of their assumption that humans have two memories: a working memory, and a long-term memory. The difference between the two is that the working memory was basically the short-termed memory system that is really only in use when you’re working on something at that specific moment. The long term memory is the general idea of memory. In other words, something we can remember on demand. The objective of studying for a test is to get everything that you need to know into your long term memory. However, according to these two researchers, the mistake that students make is that they think the way that they will get the information into their long-term memory is through their short one. The researchers designed two studies that relied on a model that showed a list of words to subjects who then were asked to remember as many of those words as they could directly after they were shown the list. In the first study they varied the rate of the presentation of the words. In some trials they lengthened the amount of time between words and in others they shortened it. In the second experiment they varied the delay with which words were presented and when the subjects were asked to recall the words. In some trials there was a small duration between the reading of the list and the recall of the list and then sometimes it was lengthened.
Their results showed the same thing. It showed that the participants generally recalled the first and last sections of the list better than they recalled the words in the middle of the list. They decided that this was expected due to the primary effect and the recency effects which were already two known effects. The results showed that if the words were presented more slowly, more words were remembered. They also predicted that the duration of time between presentation and recall would affect their curve. If there was more time between the presentation and recall, less words at the end were remembered. The conclusion of why the words in the beginning were remembered more is because as the subject read the words they commit those words to memory until there is too much information to process. If there is more time to do this, they will remember more. In the middle of the list, by contrast, the brain relies more on short-term memory. The same thing is true about cramming. When you cram, you read information and try to commit to memory, however it is simply forgotten in a couple hours. Similarly to the study, you are likely to remember the beginning and end of your study session the most.
The second study that I found focuses more on cramming with flashcards. It seems to be common practice that we make a bunch of flashcards and then take out a card if we get it right once assuming that we already know that information. However, this may not be the smartest option. In an experiment that was done during the Association for Psychological Science by a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles and a professor of psychology there, 20 people were asked to study 20 word pairs on flashcards for one hour. Half of the participants were instructed to review the whole stack of 20 cards eight times. As for the other half, they were told to break up their stack into small stacks of 5 and reviewing each stack eight times, and then moving onto the next stack. The two groups were asked to predict how many they would remember that final exam. The people with the small stacks predicted that they would have a 68% average, and the people studying the full stack predicted they would remember only 53% of the cards. What they found at the end was the complete opposite. At the end of the hour they found that the people who studied the full cycle of cards had an average exam score of 80 percent, and the people who studied the small stacks had an average of 54%. They used this evidence to conclude that cramming does not in fact work. Mr. Kornell noted that when you study something unfamiliar repeatedly in immediate succession it seems like you know the material a lot better than you actually do. It’s better to create an interval between the times that you study something.
There are numerous other studies that suggest the same thing about cramming before a test. It may be clearer whether or not cramming is actually as bad as everyone makes it out to be if these studies were done at a greater scale rather than small tests groups. However with the first series of studies that I discussed, I do think that it was important to do two different studies rather than one. Overall, since there is a common conception that cramming is definitely not the most effective way to remember information, it is either by chance that people do not remember things as well when they cram or it’s actually true or a false negative. No matter what, there are other things that you can do if you must cram. It’s better to spend 20-30 minutes a night to focus on a small portion of facts. You can try to focus on the most important parts of the test at the beginning of your cram session, the least important in the middle, and the second most important at the end. But avoiding cramming is most likely the best choice to make.
Sources:
http://learninglab.psych.purdue.edu/downloads/Chronicle_Cramming.pdf