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Surveys

Surveys

Often, psychologists develop surveys as a means of gathering data. Surveys are lists of questions to be answered by research participants, and can be delivered as paper-and-pencil questionnaires, administered electronically, or conducted verbally. Generally, the survey itself can be completed in a short time, and the ease of administering a survey makes it easy to collect data from a large number of people.

Blind Procedures

Blind Procedures

Ideally, the people who observe and record the children’s behavior are unaware of who was assigned to the experimental or control group, in order to control for experimenter bias. Experimenter bias refers to the possibility that a researcher’s expectations might skew the results of the study. Remember, conducting an experiment requires a lot of planning, and the people involved in the research project have a vested interest in supporting their hypotheses. If the observers knew which...

Confirmation Biases

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Archival Research

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Some researchers gain access to large amounts of data without interacting with a single research participant. Instead, they use existing records to answer various research questions. This type of research approach is known as archival research. Archival research relies on looking at past records or data sets to look for interesting patterns or relationships. For example, a researcher might access the academic records of all individuals who enrolled in college within the past ten years and...

Ethics in Research

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Today, scientists agree that good research is ethical in nature and is guided by a basic respect for human dignity and safety. However, this has not always been the case. Modern researchers must demonstrate that the research they perform is ethically sound.

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Cochran's Q Test is a nonparametric statistical test used to determine if there are potential differences in the outcomes of three or more related groups on a binary (yes/no) or dichotomous outcome. It is essentially an extension of the McNemar Test, which is limited to two related samples - Cochran's Q test can handle three or more related samples, making it more versatile in scenarios where subjects are measured under multiple conditions. The test statistic follows a Chi-Square...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Nov 17, 2025

Online Explorative Study on the Learning Uses of Virtual Reality Among Early Adopters

Online Explorative Study on the Learning Uses of Virtual Reality Among Early Adopters

Published on: November 22, 2019

Pretesting can be beneficial even when using the internet to answer questions.

Benjamin C Storm¹, Kelsey K James¹, Sean M Stone¹

¹Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA.

Memory (Hove, England)

|February 17, 2021

Summary

The pretesting effect enhances learning by prompting information retrieval. This study found that pretesting benefits memory even when participants use Google to find answers, challenging prior assumptions about online information access.

Keywords:

Pretesting internet offloading retrieval transactive memory

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Last Updated: Nov 17, 2025

Online Explorative Study on the Learning Uses of Virtual Reality Among Early Adopters

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Educational Psychology
Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

The pretesting effect demonstrates that attempting to recall information improves subsequent learning and memory.
The rise of readily available online information raises questions about whether traditional memory-enhancement techniques remain effective.
It was hypothesized that easy internet access might diminish the benefits of pretesting by reducing self-retrieval attempts.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether the pretesting effect is reduced when information is accessible online.
To determine if participants benefit from pretesting when using search engines like Google to find answers.

Main Methods:

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis.
Participants were pretested on information, with conditions varying in whether they retrieved answers from memory or searched online.
Subsequent learning and memory recall were assessed for pretested and non-pretested material.

Main Results:

Results did not support the hypothesis that online information access reduces the pretesting effect.
Participants consistently remembered pretested information better than non-pretested information.
This benefit was observed irrespective of whether participants retrieved answers from memory or used Google search.

Conclusions:

The benefits of pretesting on memory and learning persist even when individuals can easily access information online.
Relying on the internet to answer questions does not negate the positive impact of pretesting on subsequent recall.
The findings suggest that pretesting remains a valuable tool for enhancing learning, even in the digital age.