Episode 4 - Spaced Practice

10/04/17 • 14 min

This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Show Notes:

Over the past few decades, cognitive psychologists have found evidence for the following 6 strategies for effective learning:

Spaced Practice
Retrieval Practice
Elaboration
Interleaving
Concrete Examples
Dual Coding

Today we’re introducing spaced practice - spacing out studying the same information over multiple sessions rather than cramming it all into one (1).

What is spaced practice?

We talk about how the idea is really simple in theory, but harder to implement. The benefits of spaced practice have been demonstrated in many domains, from fact learning (2), to problem solving (3), and even to musical instrument learning (4). We also talk about how the benefits of spaced practice appear on a delayed test rather than an immediate test (5).

For more about how spaced practice can be helpful and instructions for how to implement it during studying, see this blog post.

How can we get students to space out their learning?

It's hard! You can try to help students set aside blocks of time to study: first have them log how they spend their time for a week, and then have them look for times in their schedule that they could dedicate to studying. Even if they only plan to study 5 minutes each day, that's infinitely more than 0 minutes! You might want to use a time log to use with your students to help them plan for spaced practice. On the podcast, we describe our own attempts at implementing spaced practice in our real lives - with variable success.

If your students need help forming intentions and sticking to them - don't we all? - you can share this guest post with them.

Implementing spaced practice in the classroom

Since it is quite difficult for students to independently engaged in spaced practice, teachers might consider providing students with opportunities for spaced practice as part of the mandatory classroom experience. If you're really planning ahead, you can try to break up the topics you're teaching and space them all out throughout the semester - but this is tricky (though see here for a resource digest full of ideas for spaced teaching).

A lighter approach to introducing spacing is to give students an opportunity to practice the information you've taught at a later date, for example by implementing "lagged" homework. In this system, homework on a given topic is given a few weeks after the topic is taught.

For more on how to implement lagged homework, see this teacher's blog post.

Another idea is to combine spaced practice with retrieval practice, providing students with in-class opportunities to retrieve information from previous classes. A teacher in the UK proposed the following method:

To read more about this method, see this blog post. And, for more about teacher implementation of spaced practice, see this guest post on our blog.

We hope you enjoyed this podcast! Check back in 2 weeks, when we’ll be releasing a “bite-size research” episode describe an interesting paper on spaced practice.

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Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

References:

(1) Ebbinghaus, H. (1913). Memory (HA Ruger & CE Bussenius, Trans.). New York: Columbia University, Teachers College. (Original work published 1885). Retrieved from

This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Show Notes:

Over the past few decades, cognitive psychologists have found evidence for the following 6 strategies for effective learning:

Spaced Practice
Retrieval Practice
Elaboration
Interleaving
Concrete Examples
Dual Coding

Today we’re introducing spaced practice - spacing out studying the same information over multiple sessions rather than cramming it all into one (1).

What is spaced practice?

For more about how spaced practice can be helpful and instructions for how to implement it during studying, see this blog post.

How can we get students to space out their learning?

If your students need help forming intentions and sticking to them - don't we all? - you can share this guest post with them.

Implementing spaced practice in the classroom

For more on how to implement lagged homework, see this teacher's blog post.

To read more about this method, see this blog post. And, for more about teacher implementation of spaced practice, see this guest post on our blog.

We hope you enjoyed this podcast! Check back in 2 weeks, when we’ll be releasing a “bite-size research” episode describe an interesting paper on spaced practice.

Subscribe to our Podcast!

Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

References:

(1) Ebbinghaus, H. (1913). Memory (HA Ruger & CE Bussenius, Trans.). New York: Columbia University, Teachers College. (Original work published 1885). Retrieved from

Previous Episode

Episode 3 - Bite-Size Research on Retrieval Practice Formats

This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Show Notes:

This is our first bite-size research episode, where we briefly describe research findings on a specific topic. This week, Megan Sumeracki talks about retrieval practice.

In our second episode, we introduced retrieval practice or bringing information to mind. We know from a century of research that retrieval practice improves learning. There are a lot of ways to practice retrieval, and this strategy seems to be very flexible and can be used in a lot of different ways.

One easy way to implement retrieval practice in the classroom is to give students frequent low-stakes or no-stakes quizzes. But the next natural question is, what retrieval format should I use?

The two most common formats are short-answer and multiple-choice formats. Some research shows that short-answer quizzes improve learning more than multiple-choice quizzes because they require the students to produce the answer (1). Yet often multiple-choice quizzes are easier to administer and to grade, and we know this is very important for busy teachers. So what to do? (Spoiler alert, based on my honors thesis and the work of others, the format does not have a huge impact on learning. The important thing is to make sure students practice retrieval in some way.)

In 2005, Park (2) created a hybrid format to try to combine the benefits of short-answer and multiple-choice formats. Sixth-grade students would first try to answer a question in short-answer format, and then could click a "next" button for the multiple-choice alternatives to select the correct answer. The catch is that the multiple-choice alternatives only show up for a brief amount of time. So, the students really had to try to produce the answer before clicking next. Park found that the hybrid quiz led to a little bit more learning than a standard multiple-choice quiz after a few days.

In 2008, I was really interested in quiz formats and decided to conduct my undergraduate honors thesis on this topic at Purdue University. In my experiments (3), students were randomly assigned to one of a few different conditions, and each condition was assigned a different retrieval-practice format. Some students answered multiple-choice questions, some answered short-answer questions, and others answered hybrid questions. Finally, some students were in a control group where they didn't answer questions at all. All of the students read a text, took a quiz (except the control group), and then read statements containing the correct answer to all of the quiz questions. One week later, we gave the students an assessment test.

My thesis advisor and I found that retrieval practice, regardless of format, improved learning over the control group.

Data from Smith & Karpicke, 2014 (3) Experiment 4

However, we also found that the type of retrieval format didn't really much matter. Across 4 experiments, any differences we found between retrieval formats were really pretty small.

Data from Smith & Karpicke, 2014 (3) Experiment 4

At first, my advisor and I were really surprised by this! But after doing a very systematic review of the literature and conducting 4 experiments of our own, it seems that the retrieval practice format does not have a huge effect on learning. Others have found little to no difference between retrieval practice formats (e.g., 4, 5, 6). In another paper that was published after mine, researchers found that there weren't format differences among younger middle school students (7).

Main Takeaway:

Retrieval practice improves learning, and we can be pretty sure of this based on a century of research. However, the type of format you use is not likely to make a huge difference to learning.

You can read a blog based on this research here. You can find the published paper containing my honors thesis experiments here. We hope you enjoyed this bite-size research podcast! Check back on the first Wednesday of next month, when we’ll be releasing a podcast about spaced practice.

Subscribe to our Podcast!

Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

References:

(1) Kang, S. H. K., McDermott, K. B., &...

Next Episode

Episode 5 - Bite-Size Research on Spaced Retrieval

This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Show Notes:

This is a bite-size research episode, where we briefly describe research findings on a specific topic. This week, Yana Weinstein talks about combining spacing and retrieval practice.

In Episode 2 we introduced retrieval practice, and in Episode 4 we introduced spaced practice. We are often asked whether these effective strategies for learning are only applicable to fact learning - at a recent workshop with K-12 teachers, we were asked:

What do these strategies do to students’ abilities to make inferences, apply what they know, and think creatively?

Megan responded to this question with a blog post aptly entitled "Retrieval and Spaced Practice Sound Great, but Are They Just for Memorization?". In this episode, I continue answering that question by describing the results of a study on spaced retrieval practice that looked not only at performance on factual questions. but also on higher-order (application) questions (1). The goal of this study was to extend the already huge evidence for the benefits of spaced retrieval practice to a situation where students were engaging in what they called higher-order learning.

The take-away points from this study are that spaced retrieval practice works not only in basic lab studies, but can also work in highly realistic classroom settings. Also, spaced retrieval can help not only memory of factual information, but also performance on more complex application questions. Thus, a very simple tweak in the timing of students’ retrieval practice can have a measurable impact on later performance.

Next month, we’ll continue by talking about Elaboration.

Subscribe to our Podcast!

Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

References:

(1) Kapler, I. V., Weston, T., & Wiseheart, M. (2015). Spacing in a simulated undergraduate classroom: Long-term benefits for factual and higher-level learning. Learning and Instruction, 36, 38-45.