Retrieval

The most common way of learning something for most people is to read and re-read  in order to learn and retain the material.

However, it has been shown by researchers in the field of cognitive psychology , especially in the past decade, that in order to learn and retain information retrieval plays a very important role. The way retrieval works is that we  read the material  and instead of re-reading in  order ,to get a firm grasp on the material ,  we try to recall what we learned from our first attempt.

we ask :

what was it about?

what was interesting?

what was Difficult?

this is called retrieval and it has been shown that answering these questions helps learn and retain the material read far better than continuous re-reading