A colleague recently asked me this thoughtful question:
I’ve seen research on the ‘Production Effect.’ It tells us that students remember words better when they say them out loud. Following this logic, will students understand ideas better if they explain them out loud? For instance: will an oral presentation to the class help my students learn more than writing an essay or taking a test?
In this blog post, I will:
- Introduce the production effect
- Explain the most common misunderstanding of the production effect, and
- Offer a more effective strategy to ensure that students understand ideas better
TL;DR: Don’t ask “Should students talk or write more?” Ask “What thinking are they doing before they talk or write?” Turns out: the production effect supports memory, but not understanding.
Introducing the Production Effect
Strong research earns trust by testing ideas from many angles. Consider, for instance, this study by Dr. Colin MacLeod and colleagues. (This is the study my colleague had seen.) In it, MacLeod’s team undertakes — depending on how you’re counting — ELEVEN different studies to explore the potential memory benefits of saying words out loud.
- They test out the benefits for real words and made-up words.
- They test the difference between actually saying the words out loud and simply mouthing them silently.
- They test the effect when one person tries both strategies, and when different groups choose only one strategy or the other.
The simple headline: YES, students remember words better when they say them out loud compared to the words they didn’t say out loud. For the stats-y people reading this post: the effect sizes here are generally impressive.
The surface level teaching implication just might be: students should write less and speak up more.
Pick Those Pens Back Up Again…
That final sentence, however, makes a crucial mistake — a mistake that’s easy to make.
Let’s go back to that “simple headline:”
Students remember words better when they say them out loud compared to the words they didn’t say out loud.
Imagine my student Tarik has a list of 20 words. If he says 10 of them out loud, he’ll remember those words better than the other ten he didn’t say out loud.
Here’s the important distinction: Imagine that Tarik and Laszlo have the same list of 20 words. Tarik says them all out loud; Laszlo does not say any of them out loud. In this case, there isn’t a statistically significant difference between the number of words Tarik and Laszlo remember.
That’s right: “Production” doesn’t matter if one person says everything out loud and the other says nothing out loud. It matters only if one person says some words out loud but doesn’t say other words out loud.
MacLeod’s team researched this question specifically in that study I described.
For this reason, we have no reason to believe that speaking thoughts results in better memory than writing thoughts. (To be precise: students who speak some thoughts out loud will remember those thoughts better than the others that they didn’t say out loud.)
From this perspective, oral presentations don’t seem like a research-based requirement.
Digging Deeper
The discovery of this nuance might prompt us to keep asking questions. The fact that we almost over-estimated the benefits of the production effect suggests we should give the “speaking > writing” idea another review. As it turns out, this decision to double check proves to have been wise. Here’s the catch:
MacLeod’s research shows that effect enhances memory. As teachers, we approve of memory (!), but we probably want comprehension and understanding as well. MacLeod’s research doesn’t test that bigger goal.
More recent research, led by Dr. Brady Roberts, does explore that question.
Team Roberts chose ten reading passages, covering topics like “the Successes of George Washington Carver” and “Introversion and Extroversion.” Students read half of these passages out loud, and the other half silently. They then answered multiple-choice questions about the passages.
Here’s the special sauce:
- roughly half of those MCQs tested simple recall: students simply had to recognize words from the passage
- the other half tested comprehension: students had to decide, for example, if the main idea of a paragraph was “similarity” or “contrast.”
Roberts’ team ran this study four different times, increasing the sample size and switching up the reading passages. The result:
- Good news: the production effect improves memory of words and passages, but
- Bad news: it does NOT improve comprehension
Let’s pause to summarize these studies so far:
First: if the goal is for individual students to remember some words or passages better than others, they should read those important passages out loud.
Second: if the goal is for students to remember all the words or passages, then reading aloud is just as good as reading silently.
Third: if the goal is for students to understand the concepts, reading aloud provides no extra benefit.
The Final Step
If reading passages out loud doesn’t enhance understanding of underlying concepts, what does?
Although this question invites a very long answer, I’ll offer two short-ish ones.
- We should focus less on the mode of presentation. In most cases, whether ideas are spoken out loud or written down (or acted out, or…) has little effect on understanding.
- Instead, we should focus on the quality of the thinking before students do their presenting. Are they elaborating? Are they self-explaning? Are they comparing and contrasting? Are they thinking critically? Are they thinking beyond the initial information they took in?
Students who do undertake such mental activity — students who think hard about the material — are much likelier to understand it than others who don’t. They may write down their ultimate thoughts and conclusions. They may explain them out loud to their peers. But that final step will have much less effect on understanding than the thinking that came before.
In a sentence: speaking and writing are both good. Thinking matters more.
MacLeod, C. M., Gopie, N., Hourihan, K. L., Neary, K. R., & Ozubko, J. D. (2010). The production effect: delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of experimental psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 36(3), 671.
Roberts, B. R., Hu, Z. S., Curtis, E., Bodner, G. E., McLean, D., & MacLeod, C. M. (2024). Reading text aloud benefits memory but not comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 52(1), 57-72.
