A study technique requiring participants to form unique combination of categories was implemented to explore its impact on test scores. Findings suggest that study aids in general seem to be more beneficial for college senior level courses than freshmen. The paradigm incorporated flash cards as a study aid prior to a psychology exam. The shallow condition allowed participants to use flash cards in an unstructured form while the elaborative condition was instructed to organize the flash cards into a small number of meaningful categories. Test performance declined for the freshman level classes regardless of condition. It was found that the dynamic concept categorization task (elaborative) was ineffective when compared to a self-driven control group (shallow). The trend of the data found from this experiment suggests that attending a review session and participating in a study aid task is more beneficial than not participating in one at all.--Abstract
