The effect of different mnemonic strategies and gender on ability to recall among secondary school students in Jos, Plateau State

Abstract

Studies have shown that males and females differ in memory associated with gender-stereotyped objects and that mnemonic strategy differs in the  ability to recall information. However, specific findings have been inconclusive regarding the specifics of these differences. This study therefore,  experimentally investigated mnemonic strategies on student’s ability to recall, adopting an independent group-randomised design. Quantitatively, the  effect of mnemonic strategies on recall ability through the ecological validity of self-paced word repetitions, mental imagery and sentence-by-sentence  presentations by comparison to normal page reading with respect to comprehension and recall across three groups (A, B and C) were investigated  among senior secondary school students in Jos, Plateau state. The results showed that mnemonic strategies do not differ in recall ability (F2, 207 = 0.61,  p=.55). Female students recalled more and performed better on mental image mnemonic than male students (t (68) = 3.23, p = .002). Female students  recalled more and performed better on sentence mnemonic than male students (t (68) = 2.04, p = .045) and no significant difference was found between  male and female students in the recall task on word repetition mnemonic (t (68) = 1.48, p = .145). It was concluded that the ability to recall is influenced by  an interaction between stimulus and participant gender. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.