On Learning by Teaching

As Science of Us has pointed out before, the science of how to best learn new information is tricky, and false beliefs abound. A recent study in Memory & Cognition offers up an intriguing possibility about how to best learn: that learning with the expectation of teaching might be more effective than learning with the expectation that you’ll be taking a test. In two experiments, the researchers had students at UCLA read passages of text, distracted them with another task, and then tested their memory of the contents of the tests with free-recall, short-answer, and fill-in-the-blank exercises.

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