Biases & effects in learning
Quoted from Wikipedia:
Zeigarnik effect – The Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.
Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik first studied the phenomenon after noticing that waiters seemed to remember orders only so long as the order was in the process of being served.
Some suggest that students who wish to remember material better should leave learning unfinished when taking breaks, according to the effect. It is also suggested that the effect is behind the cliffhanger plot device.
Primacy effect – The primacy effect, in psychology, is a cognitive bias that results from disproportionate salience of initial stimuli or observations. If, for example, a subject reads a sufficiently-long list of words, he or she is more likely to remember words read toward the beginning than words read in the middle.
The recency effect is comparable to the primacy effect, but for final stimuli or observations. Taken together the primacy effect and the recency effect predict that, in a list of items, the ones most likely to be remembered are the items near the beginning and the end of the list (serial position effect). Lawyers scheduling the appearance of witnesses for court testimony, and managers scheduling a list of speakers at a conference, take advantage of these effects when they put speakers they wish to emphasize at the very beginning or the very end of a long list.
Spacing effect – The spacing effect states that while you are more likely to remember material if exposed to it many times, you will be much more likely to remember it if the exposures are repeated over a longer span of time.
In other words, distributive repetition (presentations spread out over time) work better than massed repetition (presentations closely together in time).
There are two explanations for this finding. According to the deficient processing view, massed repetition leads to only one representation of the material in memory. However, according to the encoding variability view, distributed repetition is likely to entail some variability in presentation; this leads to a more robust memory that is more connected to other ideas.
For students, this effect suggests that “cramming” (intense, last-minute studying) the night before an exam is not likely to be as effective as studying at intervals over a much longer span of time.