Students' long-term memories from an ecology field excursion: Retelling a narrative as an interplay between implicit and explicit memories

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the science content remembered by biology students 6 and 12 months after an ecology excursion. The students' memories were tested during a stimulated recall interview. The authors identified three different types of memories: recall, recognition and narratives. The dual memory system model of learning was used to connect recall to the explicit memory system (declarative knowledge), and recognition to the implicit memory system (tacit knowledge). The results show that the students' re-told narratives were scrambled and sometimes distorted. The students used small fragments to create their story and the next fragment of the story primarily depended on the antecedent unit. It is therefore suggested that in telling a narrative there is a constant interplay between the explicit (recall) and implicit (recognition) memory systems. The scientific terms (recall) were often replaced by everyday terms, indicating that the underlying meaning is not connected to the specific terms.