Imagine: Someone asks you what the capital of South Africa is, or which pasta and bacon are best for a pasta amatriciana or carbonara. If you don’t immediately know the answer, what do you do? Do you first try to dig deep into your memory to ‘find’ the answer (you know you once knew it, but…) and if that doesn’t work, do you then Google it, OR do you give in to convenience, immediately grab your smartphone and Google it? Regardless of your answer, the question for me is: Does it really matter what you do?
Saskia Giebl and colleagues, including Elizabeth and Robert Bjork, explored this question in the article ‘Thinking first versus Googling first: preferences and consequences’. Because the internet lets us search for information we need anytime and anywhere, it’s essential to understand both the potential costs and benefits of this easy solution. One cost, according to the authors, is that by Googling before trying to remember the answer yourself, you deprive yourself of the benefits of consulting your long-term memory (you don’t experience the advantages of retrieval practice). Recent research has shown that attempting to generate an answer before being exposed to the correct answer can facilitate and enhance future learning, even if you essentially have to guess or if the answer you come up with is wrong. This is referred to as the pretesting effect[1]. Pretesting can promote learning because trying to retrieve or generate a possible answer from memory (a) activates existing knowledge and application schemata in your long-term memory; (b) provokes your curiosity and interest in the answer (a type of arousal); (c) aids in metacognitive evaluation of what you do or don’t know about a particular topic; or (d) makes you more familiar with the presented information so you can organise it better in your long-term memory. All these mechanisms can enhance processing, meaning the information is encoded more extensively and deeply (i.e., storage strength) and also retrieved more often (i.e., retrieval strength), and thus better remembered or as the case may be, less easily forgotten.
However, formulating a search query and then Googling it could also have a positive effect on remembering or learning because, on the one hand, you have to think about the Google query, which stimulates your thinking. After Googling, more space could be freed up in working memory for better learning. This is called ‘cognitive offloading’. This also happens when you use pencil and paper to solve a math problem instead of doing mental arithmetic, for example.
Giebl et al. investigated this question in four experiments. Participants were given both difficult and easy general knowledge questions to answer. An easy question might be: In which sport are the terms gutter, lane, and pin used[2]? A difficult question might be: Which mountain range runs through France and Switzerland[3]? The participants were divided into four groups. One group was asked to think of answers before they could consult the internet (think-before-Googling). A second group could immediately search for answers without first attempting to come up with an answer (immediately Google). A third group was shown the question and the corresponding answer simultaneously (question and answer presented simultaneously). The last group first tried to answer the question before being given the correct answer (think-before-presented-answer).
In general, thinking before Googling helped participants remember more answers in a subsequent test than immediately Googling. There was hardly any effect for the easy questions, but a significant effect for the difficult ones. When asked what they usually do when they receive a question and don’t know the answer, 81% of the respondents replied that they usually immediately search for the answer on Google without first thinking. It turned out that there was an advantage to Googling both before and after trying to think of the right answer, compared to receiving the question and answer simultaneously. Thus, in such a situation, Googling, thanks to formulating or even thinking about the search query, can act as a generative activity with favourable learning effects. Finally, the results showed that thinking before Googling leads to better learning than thinking first and then receiving the answer.
In conclusion, we can say that (1) it’s better to think first… whether you then Google or simply receive an answer, (2) this is especially true for more challenging questions, and (3) immediately Googling is better than receiving questions and answers simultaneously.
In an earlier article (2020), Giebl and colleagues investigated a similar question, but with a different population and topic: programming. In that study, there were two groups. Both first received a general text related to a task they had to perform later (Phase 1); these were fundamental programming concepts in the context of a problem-solving task. After this phase, one group first tried to solve the problem (which was virtually impossible with the information from Phase 1) and then were allowed to Google using a database specially set up for this study. The other group could Google immediately. In a later multiple-choice test with both knowledge and transfer questions, participants who tried the task before they could consult Google performed better than participants who could immediately search on Google. When the participants were later divided based on their prior programming knowledge, the advantage of first trying to solve the problem was significantly greater among participants with some programming experience. This aligns with the idea that some prior knowledge can help students better integrate new information. This benefits both the learning of new information and the consolidation/enhancement of previously studied related information.
Both studies underscore the importance of retrieval and generation processes for learning. Thinking before Googling is a way to use the internet as a knowledge source while simultaneously enriching and expanding our own memory. As Robert and Elizabeth Bjork wrote in 2011:
“…any time that you, as a learner, look up an answer or have somebody tell or show you something that you could instead, drawing on current cues and your past knowledge, generate yourself, you rob yourself of a powerful learning opportunity.” (p. 61)
The authors conclude their article:
“We cannot and do not want to go back to a world without the internet as a tool for us. In fact, most of us feel we can’t live without it. The current findings suggest a potential way for our memory and the internet to enter into a symbiotic relationship, but there’s still much more to learn about how best to live with this incredible resource.”
P.S. The best pasta for a pasta carbonara of amatriciana is bucatini (a rough and hollow pasta that holds the sauce better), and the meat you should use is called guanciale (cheek bacon). Also, South Africa actually has three capitals: Pretoria (executive), Cape Town (legislative), and Bloemfontein (judicial). Did you come up with the answers yourself or did you Google them?
References
Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers.
Giebl, S., Mena, S., Sandberg, R., Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2022). Thinking first versus googling first: Preferences and consequences. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000072
Giebl, S., Mena, S., Storm, B. C., Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2021). Answer first or google first? Using the internet in ways that enhance, not impair, one’s subsequent retention of needed information. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 20(1), 58–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725720961593
[1] Ernst Rothkopf, the man who launched the concept of mathemagenic activities (activities that give birth to learning), did a lot of research into the effects of asking adjunct pre- and post-questions in learning texts.
[2] Bowling
[3] The Alps
3-Star learning experiences 