How similar your guess is to a prompt will influence your memory for the answer

What is it about?

You’re given the questions to a study guide, but you don't know where to start. With whatever knowledge you do have, try to guess the solution to the questions before you look in your lecture slides or notes for the correct answer. Once you’ve guessed what the answer is to a question, immediately check for how correct you were in your notes. Were you correct? Were you wrong? If you were incorrect, that’s even better! Our research highlights that depending on what your initial guess was, it either internally bridges the question and answer together in memory or corrects the error originally made to strengthen the question-answer connection.

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Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We assessed semantic relatedness on a continuous spectrum, which has not been done before in the literature surrounding this learning phenomenon. Through this, we see that the quality of a guess in relation to both the prompt and the answer highly influences the effectiveness of this learning strategy.