Sport-related concussion has been the subject of extensive study in the past decade. There has been an emphasis on the importance of raising awareness among athletes of  concussion through education. 

Previous studies have put forward a multiselect checklist item to assess an athlete’s ability to recognize true signs and symptoms among other irrelevant phenomena. Although this method may identify the athlete’s ability to recognize symptoms from a list, an open-ended recall question format may be more suited to identifying the ability to retrieve appropriate symptoms from long-term memory.

 Recognition is one’s ability to identify subject matter through the process of familiarity, whereas retrieval of knowledge or recall refers to one’s ability to search the relevant information in long-term memory and is influenced by the extent to which the person was exposed to the information previously. Consequently, earlier investigators who focused on the recognition of symptoms may not have comprehensively assessed athletes’ true understanding of concussion.