Generation Effect

The generation effect is the finding that people remember information better when they actively generate it themselves, such as by producing a missing word or completing a rule, than when they simply read the same information presented to them in full, a phenomenon documented experimentally by psychologists Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf in a 1978 paper. In their study, participants who generated the second word of a paired association from a rule and a cue, such as producing cold when given the antonym rule and the word hot, later recalled the pairs better than participants who had simply read the complete pair as given. The effect is understood to work because the additional cognitive effort involved in generating an answer creates a more elaborate and better-connected memory trace than passive reading does, and it has informed education research on learning techniques such as fill-in-the-blank study guides and practice problems that require a learner to produce an answer rather than merely recognize one, a close relative of the testing effect and retrieval practice research more broadly.