The independent variable is whether the participants have free recall or whether they have cued recall. The dependant variable is the number of words recalled by the two separate groups.
There was a numerous amount of extraneous variables that were controlled. One of these was noise, because noise may distract participants and cause them to loose concentration, which in turn will hinder the words they remember. Participants may also not be able to hear the words read out. To control this I am going to do the experiment at a suitable time when students will be in lessons and not on the corridors making noise. The experiment will be in a classroom as far away from the playing fields as possible, so that outside noise is not a distraction.
Participants
The target population used was year 10 students from High Storrs School, Sheffield. The sampling method which was used was opportunity sampling which involved finding a class that would be available at a time that suited me and them. This method was used because opportunity sampling is quicker, less time consuming and easier than other methods, such as random sampling, which would have been more time consuming finding 30 random year 10’s. The participants that took part in my experiment were a mixture of males and females. ( 9 boys and 11 girls) between the ages of 14-15 years old. However as they are under 16 I had to get a letter of the head teacher to send to their parents and guardians, asking for their permission for their son or daughter to take part in the experiment ( see appendix)
Materials
- 10 pieces of blank paper
- 10 pieces of paper with the five categories
- A list of the words arranged randomly.
I chose to write out a list of words which people use in their everyday life, to make sure everyone would know what every word was and meant, for example pets such as dogs, cats and flowers: such as roses. I tried to make the words simple and short so they wouldn’t be really hard to remember. I arranged the words so that they could be put into categories. I tried to choose word categories that were simple such as school subjects, food etc. However in doing this, I did not want to make for example the school subjects too obvious e.g. maths, science etc, as people could guess the answer which would make the experiment not accurate. 20 words were chosen so that the participants wouldn’t get bored, loose concentration and give up and so that they didn’t find it too hard to remember the words. And 5 categories, so participants would find it a lot easier putting them into just a few, rather a lot of different categories. The arrangements of words read out was in no particular order I tried to split up the words which were in the same categories so the people with category cues did not have a big advantage over the people without.
Procedure
Participants were chosen by talking to form tutors and finding a class that was available, and able to do the experiment at the time I chose which was 20 to 9 in the morning. They were briefed. They were told that the experiment would be investigating the aspects of memory (see apendix1). If participants decided not to take part in the experiment they were thanked and the rest of the participants were the split up into two groups by dividing them down the middle depending on where they sat, and either given a blank piece of paper or a piece of paper with 5 different categories on. (see appendix 2) I made sure the words were read out in a random order e.g. dog, rose, pizza not dog, cat, rabbit etc. (see appendix 3) They were told that they were doing and experiment into memory. I then instructed them that they would have to listen to words I read out and remember as many of possible, once I had finished they were then instructed to recall as many as possible on either the blank piece of paper provided or order the category headings provided Once the task was completed they were debriefed. They were told that the purpose of the experiment was to find out weather people recall more words when they had category cues to help them than if they just had a blank sheet of paper. They were then reassured that their results would remain anonymous and that their results could be withdrawn from the experiment if they wished. (See appendix 1)
Ethical issues
They were several ethical issues relevant to this investigation. This is due to the British psychological Society guidelines that need to be followed under any experiment. These were the right to withdraw at anytime and that as the participants would be under 16 they would need consent through a letter from a parent or guardian the (locus parents law). From the start of the procedure I ask permission from the teacher to let the children participants when explaining what they would be taking part I made very clear that at any point during the experiment they had the right to withdraw so that no one felt reassure into to doing it also at the end of the experiment in the debrief telling them they could withdraw at the end and I did not have to collect their results if they did not want me to do so.
Results
For the actually raw data from my investigation see appendix 4.
The table below shows the percentages of the amount of words remembered by both participants with free recall and cued recall.
As you can see from the table above more participants remembered words when category cues were present. A total of 34 more words were remembered a percentage of 17% which is a significant difference. (See appendix 4 for the raw data.)
Mean for participants without category cues = 66 divide by 10 = 6.6=7
Mean = 7
Mean for participants with category cues = 100 divide by 10 = 10
Mean = 10
The mean also helps reinforce the fact that participants with cues remember more words.
.
Discussion
The experiments hypothesis “Participants recall more words when retrieval cues (category headings) are present, than participants with no retrieval cues/category headings.” This can be accepted as the results show that more participants remember words when retrieval/ category cues are present. 17% more words were recalled with retrieval/ category cues which is a sufficient amount to prove the hypothesis correct. I can therefore reject the null hypothesis “There will be no significant difference between category cues and free recall, any difference will be due to chance” as the difference between the free recall and category cues was too great to be because of chance.
The results are quite similar to the findings of the experiment carried out by Tulving and Pearlstone there experiment found that only 40 % of the words were remembered when there was no category cues present, and when retrieval cues were present over 60% of words were remembered my results show a big difference between the two conditions as well, 33% of words remembered when no retrieval/category cues were present and 50% when category cues were present the difference between both experiments is similar the participants in my experiment did not seem to remember as many words this may be due to a number of variables for example the age of the participants or the words used how easy or hard they were to remember. However the difference between how many was remembered is very similar.
It can be concluded that when people have retrieval cues they remember things better. If things are grouped with category cues attached to the group it is more likely that someone would remember more words that just remembering words through free recall.
I had one problem when conducting the experiment, this was that as I was doing the experiment in school time, in a classroom with participants that were young and easily distracted. They found it hard to concentrate throughout the whole experiment as there was constant noise from the corridors and been surrounded by there friends was very distracting for them. By splitting the participants down the middle by where they were sat was not a good idea as they were easily distracted by there peers This could have effected my results compromising the validity of the research.
If the study was to be repeated I would make sure the participants had fewer distractions. Doing the experiment after school would help reduce the noise level on the corridors and testing each participant individually I would also try to separate each participants by putting everyone on separate tables this would stop them talking to each other as much and maybe concentrate more on the task . By doing this, the environmental conditions would be the same for all the participants reducing the risk of environmental variables on the results.
If I did further research I would like to explore weather the effects would be the same with an older generation of people and weather if they were old they would remember more or less words that someone younger. I would give all participants the same words and categories cues but instead of just comparing free recall and category cues I would also compare two different ages 11-17 and 65+ and see if there was a noticeable difference in words remembered.
References
Pennington, D. (2002).Introducing Psychology, Approaches, Topics and methods. Abingdon Hodder and Stoughton
Appendix
1) Brief:(To teacher)I am doing an investigation to find out whether people remember more words if categories are present to act as retrieval cues. I was wondering if it was possible to carry out this investigation on your students.
(To students) I am doing an investigation to find out whether people remember more words if categories are present to act as retrieval cues. Would you be ok with taking part in my investigation?
Standard instructions: I will split you into 2 groups and will give you a piece of paper I will need you to be silent during the experiment so when I read the words out to you, you can hear them and write down as many as you can remember either in the categories provided or on the blank sheet of paper in front of you. If you do not want to take part In the experiment you have the right to withdraw now or at any time during the experiment. Please do not write your name on the paper as this experiment is completely confidential.
Debrief: thank you for taking part in my experiment I will now collect your papers in you can still withdraw if you wish.
Your result will determine whether people remember more words when they have category cues or if they remember more through free recall
Any questions?
Thank you again.
Bye.
2) Categories and words used:
Flowers: rose, daisy, sunflower, daffodil
Foods: pizza, chocolate, apple, ice cream
Pets: dog, cat, rabbit, snake
Household objects: table, kettle, microwave, bed
School subjects: maths, English, drama, geography
3) Order of the words when read out:
- Rose
- Dog
- Table
- Maths
- Pizza
- English
- Kettle
- Cat
- Chocolate
- Daisy
- Sunflower
- Apple
- Rabbit
- Microwave
- Drama
- ice cream
- daffodil
- snake
- bed
- geography
4)
The table below show the result of the experiment:
