Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.
J Exp Psychol Appl. 2010 Sep;16(3):308-16. doi: 10.1037/a0020992.
Students are often encouraged to generate and answer their own questions on to-be-remembered material, because this interactive process is thought to enhance memory. But does this strategy actually work? In three experiments, all participants read the same passage, answered questions, and took a test to get accustomed to the materials in a practice phase. They then read three passages and did one of three tasks on each passage: reread the passage, answered questions set by the experimenter, or generated and answered their own questions. Passages were 575-word (Experiments 1 and 2) or 350-word (Experiment 3) texts on topics such as Venice, the Taj Mahal, and the singer Cesaria Evora. After each task, participants predicted their performance on a later test, which followed the same format as the practice phase test (a short-answer test in Experiments 1 and 2, and a free recall test in Experiment 3). In all experiments, best performance was predicted after generating and answering questions. We show, however, that generating questions led to no improvement over answering comprehension questions, but that both of these tasks were more beneficial than rereading. This was the case on an immediate short-answer test (Experiment 1), a short-answer test taken 2 days after study (Experiment 2), and an immediate free recall test (Experiment 3). Generating questions took at least twice as long as answering questions in all three experiments, so although it is a viable alternative to answering questions in the absence of materials, it is less time-efficient.
学生们经常被鼓励去生成和回答他们自己的关于待记忆材料的问题，因为这个互动的过程被认为可以增强记忆。但是这个策略真的有效吗？在三个实验中，所有的参与者都阅读了相同的段落，回答了问题，并参加了一个测试，以便在练习阶段熟悉材料。然后，他们阅读了三个段落，并在每个段落上完成了三个任务之一：重读段落、回答实验者设置的问题或生成和回答自己的问题。段落是关于威尼斯、泰姬陵和歌手 Cesaria Evora 等主题的 575 字（实验 1 和 2）或 350 字（实验 3）的文本。在每个任务之后，参与者预测他们在后续测试中的表现，该测试采用与练习阶段测试相同的格式（实验 1 和 2 是简答题，实验 3 是自由回忆测试）。在所有实验中，预测最佳表现是在生成和回答问题之后。然而，我们表明，生成问题并没有比回答理解问题带来更好的效果，但这两个任务都比重读更有益。这在即时的简答题测试（实验 1）、学习后 2 天的简答题测试（实验 2）和即时的自由回忆测试（实验 3）中都是如此。生成问题在所有三个实验中都至少比回答问题多花两倍的时间，因此，虽然它是在没有材料的情况下回答问题的一种可行替代方案，但它的效率较低。
