We were recently in England (June and July 2017) talking with teachers all over the country. One teacher at ResearchED Rugby asked us to write more about effective procedures for using retrieval practice (and other strategies) with younger children.
All in Learning Scientists Posts
The Cost of Task Switching: A Simple Yet Very Powerful Demonstration
As a cognitive psychologist, I think it’s important for students to understand how their attention works. But, unlike aspects principles of cognition that are easy to demonstrate, attention can be somewhat elusive. Perception can be demonstrated...
On the Potential Limitations of Spacing and Retrieval Practice in the Classroom (and the Need for More Applied Research)
We have been writing a lot about the top two learning strategies that cognitive psychology has brought out: Spacing and retrieval practice. Both learning strategies have accumulated a vast amount of scientific evidence, making us confident to recommend these strategies to teachers and students. However, it is important to keep in mind...
The Key to Interleaving: Jumble It Up!
Interleaving can be a confusing topic and is often confused with spaced practice. In laboratory studies, we can disentangle the effects of interleaving and spacing to show that they are both helpful on their own to produce learning (1). However, in classroom ...
Retrieval and Spaced Practice Sound Great, but Are They Just for Memorization?
We recently received this question at a workshop we ran for K-12 teacher and leaders. After hearing the research on spaced practice and retrieval, one might wonder: What do these strategies do to students’ abilities to make inferences, apply what they know, and think creatively?
Does Prompting Students During Retrieval Practice Improve Performance?
When we practice retrieval, or bring information to mind from our memories, we typically improve our memory for the information. Retrieval practice can be implemented in a lot of different ways, and we’ve talked about a number of them, for example short-answer ...