The Effect Of Overlearning On Long-Term Retention

The research of memory is always the hot topic of psychology, and there are many articles or papers discussing of it. Some researchers are interested in studying of forgetting, like the forgetting of emotional memory, the forgetting of implicit memory and explicit memory. Nowadays, a lot of people focus on researching the relationship between overlearniing and forgetting, and some authors consider that overlearning is an efficient strategy for long-term retention; however, the others are standing in the opposite position, regarding overlearning as an inefficient strategy for learning material for meaningfully long periods of time. Actually, there is no one having studied the relationship between overlearning and forgetting in China, then we read lots of papers and articles to introduce of it to our home, and take retention interval as the moderator variable.In the first part of this paper, we describe the backgrounds of overlearning and forgetting, and explain the meaning of the key words, like memory, forgetting, overlearning and retention interval. Then we illustrate the research status of them both in China and other countries. In this part we also demonstrate our structure and main contributions. In the second part of it, we put forward our4hypothesis. Then in the third part, we state our experiment in detail, including participants, materials, procedure, furthermore, we explains the differences between our experiment and Rohrers’experiment. As for the fourth portion, we use independent-samples T-test, ANOVA, two-way ANOVA to analyze our data. We discuss the outcome of our data and compare to American data in the fifth part, finding that our experiment data support our hypothesis. At the last two chapters, we indicate that our findings are very meaningful for practices as far as training, education, staff management of international corporations, and so on. Then we forecast the future research directions of overlearning and forgetting.In our experiment, we choose the undergraduates in School of Business Administration of Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, totally240. On the basis of Rohrers’study, we use the same materials and conduct the same procedure to carry out our research. There are some differences between our research and the American research, we explain them detailly.In order to assess whether the participants may have known these city-country pairs prior to the experiment, we surveyed a different sample of20participants from the same population. They were asked to supply the country for each city. Their accuracy averaged1.4%. After analyzed our data, we find:1、Chinese participants have the same memory forgetting curve as American students;2、Overlearning is an inefficient strategy for learning material for meaningfully long periods of time;3、In general, Chinese students have better memory than American students, though in different retention intervals.