Improving Students' Study Habits by Demonstrating the Mnemonic Benefits of Semantic Processing

This article describes an in-class exercise that illustrates the advantage of semantic over nonsemantic study habits. The exercise includes a survey of students' current study strategies, followed by the presentation of an abbreviated version of Craik and Tulving's (1975) classic levels-of-processing experiment. We observed significant benefits of semantic processing over nonsemantic processing, and this result motivated an in-depth discussion regarding the limitations of students' intuitions about effective study strategies and methods for improving current strategies. The brief exercise changed students' intended strategies for future studying and helped students learn the concept of semantic processing.