Generation effect
생성 효과
Also known as: generation effect
The finding that people remember information better when they produce it themselves than when they only read it.
In 1978 Slamecka and Graf reported across five experiments that people who generated part of a word pair themselves remembered it better than people who simply read it. The phenomenon is called the generation effect.
In practice this means producing beats receiving: writing a letter by hand, however clumsily, beats looking at a finished one, and filling a blank beats reading the answer. It is why the alphabet writing sets in NoryBook always leave one line with no guide at all.
One caution: asking a child to generate something they have never seen produces frustration, not memory. Show first, then ask them to produce.
- When to useAt review, not first exposure. It consolidates what has already been met once.
- RelatedSits alongside retrieval practice and the spacing effect.