Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Word games such as crossword puzzles are widely used in ed-ucation to help familiarize students with technical vocabulary.Despite an extensive literature discussing their use, few pub-lished research articles have established their effectiveness onmemory retention and retrieval, especially in comparison tocontrol study methods. We report two experiments in whichuniversity introductory psychology students studied materialsrelevant to their coursework using an on-line interactive wordgame. Results showed that word games improved later tests ofthe material, both on immediate test and after a delay, and re-tention was most enhanced in comparison to control when theclues were solved repeatedly and given with difficult ortho-graphic hints. Importantly, easy clues were not retained overtime even with multiple repetitions. Results suggest that wordgames can be effective in this domain, but it depends on howthey are implemented, and several factors predicted by existingcognitive theory can guide implementation choices.