How does study strategy influence the way students experience effort?

Abstract

Understanding how and why students engage in certain strategies over others remains an important question. The choices that people make are influenced by their experiences, so one possible explanation for the discrepancy in popularity between rereading and retrieval could be that these strategies may differ in terms of how they are subjectively experienced. In the two present studies, we investigate whether varying study strategy leads to systematic changes in student experience, and whether various facets of cognitive effort correlate with performance on a final memory test. In Study I, participants (n=245) were randomly assigned to study a passage using either rereading or retrieval and reported on their experience of cognitive effort as well as their experience of flow (i.e., DEC) while studying. Participants’ memory of the passage was tested using a multiple-choice quiz and retrospective motivation was measured. Task difficulty was significantly higher in the retrieval than in the restudy condition, but there were no significant differences between the two conditions in participants’ felt effort or their fatigue. Task difficulty and fatigue were significantly negatively correlated with test performance, while felt effort had no correlation. Participants in the rereading condition performed better than those in the retrieval condition on the final memory test. To further determine whether effort correlates with performance on the final memory test, Study II (n=53) followed the same methodology as Study I, but in addition to writing an immediate test, participants returned one week later for a delayed memory test. There were no significant differences between strategies for any facets of effort, but felt effort was significantly positively correlated with immediate test performance in the retrieval condition. These studies show the importance of disentangling the different facets of cognitive effort and highlight the need for a more specific definition of effort in the literature.