B 篇

If I asked you to sit down and remember a list of phone numbers or a series of facts, how would you go about it? There’s a fair chance that you’d be doing it wrong. One of the interesting things about the mind is that even though we all have one, we all have one, we don ’t have perfect insight（洞察力）into how to get the best from it. This is partly because of flaws（缺陷）in our ability to think about our own thinking. Studying this self-reflective thought process exposes human being ’ personal blind spots. One area there these blind spots are particularly large is learning. We ’ re actually surprisingly bad at having insight into how we learn best. Researchers Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger IIII made an experiment, where they asked college students to learn pairs of Swahib and English words. So, for example, they had to learn that if they were given the Swahili word “mashua” the correct response was “ boat ” . They could have used the sort of facts you might get on a high-school quiz, but the use of Swahili meant that there was little chance their participants could use any background knowledge to help them learn. After the pairs had all been learned, there would be a final test a week later. Now if many of us were revising this list we might study the list, test ourselves and then repeat this cycle, dropping items we got right. This makes studying and testing quicker and allows us to focus our effort on the things we haven’t yet learned. It’s a plan that seems to make perfect sense, but that is disastrous if we really want to learn properly. Karpicke and Roediger asked students to prepare for a test in various ways, and compared their success —for example, one group kept testing themselves on all items without dropping what they were getting right, while another group stopped testing themselves on their correct answers. On the final exam differences between the groups were dramatic. While dropping items from study didn’t have much of an effect, the people who dropped items from testing performed relatively poorly. It seems the effective way to learn is to practice getting items back from memory, not trying to consolidate （巩固）them in there by further study. Moreover, dropping items entirely from you revision, which is the advice given by many study guides, is wrong. You can stop studying them if you’ve learned them, but you should keep testing what you’ve learned if you want to remember them at the time of the final exam. So the evidence has a moral for teachers: there’s more to testing than finding out what students knows —tests can also help us remember.

According to the passage, we often fail to remember facts because _______.