CHANGES IN MEMORY AWARENESS DURING LEARNING - THE ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE BY PSYCHOLOGY UNDERGRADUATES

First-year psychology students took multiple-choice examinations follo wing each of 4 lecture courses and 3 laboratory research methods cours es. One lecture course was later retested. Students indicated state of memory awareness accompanying each answer: recollective experience (r emember), ''just know'' (know), feeling of familiarity (familiarity), or guess. On the lecture courses, higher performing students differed from other students because they had more remember responses. On resea rch methods, higher performing students differed because they knew mor e, and in the delayed retest, higher performing students differed beca use they now knew rather than remembered more. These findings demonstr ate a shift from remembering to knowing, dependent upon level attained , type of course, and retention interval, and suggest an underlying sh ift in knowledge representation from episodic to semantic memory. The authors discuss theoretical and educational implications of the findin gs.