Every day, students and instructors are faced with the decision of when to study information. The timing of study, and how it affects memory retention, has been explored for many years in research on ...human learning. This research has shown that performance on final tests of learning is improved if multiple study sessions are separated—i.e., "spaced" apart—in time rather than massed in immediate succession. In this article, we review research findings of the types of learning that benefit from spaced study, demonstrations of these benefits in educational settings, and recent research on the time intervals during which spaced study should occur in order to maximize memory retention. We conclude with a list of recommendations on how spacing might be incorporated into everyday instruction.
Retrieval practice has been shown to benefit learning. However, the benefit has sometimes been attenuated with more complex materials that require integrating multiple units of information. ...Critically, Tran et al. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22, 135-140 (2015) found that retrieval practice improves sentence memory but not the drawing of inferences from the same sentences. In three experiments, we investigated whether this lack of benefit of retrieval practice for inferential ability was due to the presentation format of the material. Participants studied four sets of seven to nine related sentences by practicing retrieval for two sets and rereading the other two sets. A final test was given 2 days later. When sentences were presented one at a time during study/practice as in Tran et al., we found no effect of retrieval practice on a test requiring inferential reasoning. When sentences in a set were presented simultaneously during study/practice, retrieval practice in the form of fill-in-the-blank testing (experiments 1 and 2) and free recall (experiment 3) aided later deductive inference more than rereading. Our findings suggest that retrieval practice can improve deductive inference, but in order to optimize its utility, the format in which the material is presented during practice must not hinder relational processing of the individual sentences.
Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007)
reported a series of experiments in which processing unrelated words in terms of their relevance to a grasslands survival scenario led to better retention ...relative to other semantic processing tasks. The impetus for their study was the premise that human memory systems evolved under the selection pressures of our ancestral past. In 3 experiments, we extended this functional approach to investigate the congruity effect-the common finding that people remember items better if those items are congruent with the way in which they are processed. Experiment 1 was a replication of
Nairne et al.'s (2007)
experiment and showed congruity effects in the survival processing paradigm. To avoid potential item-selection artifacts from randomly selected words, we manipulated congruence between words and processing condition in Experiments 2 and 3. As expected, final recall was highest when the type of processing and the materials were congruent, indicating that people remember stimuli better if the stimuli are congruent with the goals associated with their processing. However, contrary to our predictions, no survival processing advantage emerged between the 2 congruent conditions or for a list of irrelevant words. When congruity was controlled in a mixed list design, the survival processing advantage disappeared.
If multiple opportunities are available to review to-be-learned material, should a review occur soon after initial study and recur at progressively expanding intervals, or should the reviews occur at ...equal intervals? Landauer and Bjork (
1978
) argued for the superiority of expanding intervals, whereas more recent research has often failed to find any advantage. However, these prior studies have generally compared expanding versus equal-interval training within a
single session
, and have assessed effects only
upon a single final test
. We argue that a more generally important goal would be to maintain high average performance over a considerable period of training. For the learning of foreign vocabulary spread over four weeks, we found that expanding retrieval practice (i.e., sessions separated by increasing numbers of days) produced recall equivalent to that from equal-interval practice on a final test given eight weeks after training. However, the expanding schedule yielded much higher average recallability over the whole training period.
Second language (L2) instruction programs often ask learners to repeat aloud words spoken by a native speaker. However, recent research on retrieval practice has suggested that imitating native ...pronunciation might be less effective than drill instruction, wherein the learner is required to produce the L2 words from memory (and given feedback). We contrasted the effectiveness of imitation and retrieval practice drills on learning L2 spoken vocabulary. Learners viewed pictures of objects and heard their names; in the imitation condition, they heard and then repeated aloud each name, whereas in the retrieval practice condition, they tried to produce the name before hearing it. On a final test administered either immediately after training (Exp. 1) or after a 2-day delay (Exp. 2), retrieval practice produced better comprehension of the L2 words, better ability to produce the L2 words, and no loss of pronunciation quality.
Studies examining the beneficial effect of testing on memory have relied almost exclusively on verbal materials. Whether testing can improve the learning of novel, abstract visuospatial information ...was investigated, using Chinese characters as study stimuli. Subjects with no prior Chinese language experience studied English words paired with their Chinese equivalents. Subsequently, they either restudied the pairs twice or attempted to retrieve covertly the Chinese characters twice (with feedback provided afterward). The durations of the study and the retrieval/feedback trials were equated. On a final test given after 10 min (Experiment 1) or 24 h (Experiment 2), the subjects who had practiced retrieval were more accurate at writing/drawing the Chinese characters than were those who had studied repeatedly. The same result was replicated when learning condition was manipulated within subjects (Experiment 3). In predictions of future performance made after training, however, the subjects seemed unaware that retrieval practice was more effective than repeated studying. Testing enhances visuospatial learning, with potential implications for learning a foreign language that uses a writing script different from one’s language: Repeated retrieval from memory trumps repeated studying.
Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) proposed that our memory systems serve an adaptive function and that they have evolved to help us remember fitness-relevant information. In a series of ...experiments, they demonstrated that processing words according to their survival relevance resulted in better retention than did rating them for pleasantness, personal relevance, or relevance to moving to a new house. The aim of the present study was to examine whether the advantage of survival processing could be replicated, using a control condition that was designed to match the survival processing task in arousal, novelty, and media exposure—the relevance to planning a bank heist. We found that survival processing nonetheless yielded better retention on both a recall (Experiment 1) and a recognition (Experiment 2) test. This mnemonic advantage of survival processing was also obtained when words were rated for their relevance to a character depicted in a video clip (Experiment 3). Our findings provide additional evidence that the mnemonic benefit of survival processing is a robust phenomenon, and they also support the utility of adopting a functional perspective in investigating memory.
During learning, interleaving exemplars from different categories (e.g., ABCBCACAB) rather than blocking by category (e.g., AAABBBCCC) often enhances inductive learning, especially when the ...categories are highly similar. However, when allowed to select their own study schedules, learners overwhelmingly tend to block rather than interleave. Category similarity has been shown to moderate the relative benefit of interleaved versus blocked study. We investigated whether learners were sensitive to category similarity when choosing exemplars for study, and whether these choices predicted their learning outcomes. In Experiment
1
, learners interleaved more often when the categories were highly similar (difficult to discriminate from each other), compared with when similarity was low. In Experiment
2
, learners were presented with two sets of categories to learn; categories within each set were similar to each other, but categories were dissimilar across sets. When learners chose to interleave, they tended to switch to a similar rather than dissimilar category. Importantly, learners’ study choices predicted their subsequent categorization performance. Our findings suggest that learners are strategic in their search for commonalities within versus differences among categories and can regulate their study behaviors based on category similarity.
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