Generation Effect

The generation effect is the finding that information a person actively generates or produces themselves, such as by completing a word fragment or answering a question, is remembered better than the same information when it is simply read or passively presented. The psychologists Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf demonstrated the effect experimentally in an influential 1978 study, showing that participants who generated target words from cues, such as producing cold from the cue hot-antonym, recalled those words more accurately later than participants who had simply read the same word pairs. The effect is widely cited in educational psychology as support for active learning strategies, such as practice testing and self-generated summaries, over passive re-reading of material.