You should guess answers to your homework before searching online

You’re doing homework online for a science class. A question pops up: Do newborn human babies see the world in black and white?You don’t know the answer. Do you guess or Google it?Searching online for the answer may get you a better grade on the homework. But it won’t necessarily help you learn. Guessing is the better strategy, a new study suggests.“Always first generate the answers for yourself,” says psychologist Arnold Glass. He works at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “It will help you do better on the exam,” notes Glass, one of the new study’s authors. If you instead find and copy the correct answer, you’ll be less likely to remember it in the future.Glass discovered this from analyzing homework and the grades on tests that he gave college students who took his courses from 2008 to 2017. Glass gives his students a series of quiz-style online homework assignments. The day before a lesson, students answer homework questions about the upcoming material. They answer similar...