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 are talking about elaboration. Be sure to listen to our spaced practice and retrieval practice episodes, as those are the most important strategies!

Elaboration is a really broad concept - at its core, it just means connecting or adding information. "Elaborative interrogation" is a strategy within this broad idea, and it involves asking “how" and “why" questions and finding those answers (1). Students can do this independently, with the teacher helping, or in pairs of groups. Once they come up with the questions, students must also find the answers!

For example, how might you learn about the physics of flying? You could do it by answering lots of fact-based questions, but you can also supplement this by asking and then answering elaboration questions, such as "why does a plane need an engine?" and "how does a plane take off?"

Elaborative interrogation can be a tricky strategy to implement, because students won’t always focus on the right information, or have the content knowledge necessary to carry out the task effectively. In the podcast episode, we use lots of examples from younger and older students, demonstrating how hard it can be to pick out the right information to ask questions about, or even come up with “how” and “why” questions at all. 

Students may also produce incorrect explanations in answer to their own questions. Elaboration has been shown to help students who are more familiar with the topic, while those who are less familiar don’t benefit as much (2); some studies (3) have even found elaboration to be less effective than re-reading, when students are unable to produce useful elaborations (see this guest blog post). Teachers will need to guide students towards the right kinds of questions, and give feedback on explanations. 

Ideally, students would be able to describe and explain ideas from memory - that is, retrieval practice using elaborative interrogation!

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

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References:

(1) Pressley, M., Symons, S., McDaniel, M. A., Snyder, B. L., & Turnure, J. E. (1988). Elaborative interrogation facilitates acquisition of confusing facts. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 268-278.

(2) Woloshyn, V. E., Pressley, M., & Schneider, W. (1992). Elaborative-interrogation and prior-knowledge effects on learning of facts. Journal of Educational Psychology, 84, 115-124.

(3) Clinton, V., Alibali, M. W., & Nathan, M. J. (2016). Learning about posterior probability: Do diagrams and elaborative interrogation help? The Journal of Experimental Education, 84, 579-599.

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.

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

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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.

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.

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 http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Ebbinghaus/memory8.htm

(2) DeRemer, P., & D'Agostino, P. R. (1974). Locus of distributed lag effect in free recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 167-171.

(3) Grote, M. G. (1995). The effect of massed versus spaced practice on retention and problem-solving in High School physics. Ohio Journal of Science, 95, 243-247.

(4) Simmons, A. L. (2012). Distributed practice and procedural memory consolidation in musicians’ skill learning. Journal of Research in Music Education, 59, 357-368.

(5) Rawson, K. A., & Kintsch, W. (2005). Rereading effects depend on time of test. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 70-80.

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.

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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) Kang, S. H. K., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger, H. L. (2007). Test format and corrective feedback modify the effects of testing on long-term retention. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 19, 528-558.

(2) Park, J. (2005). Learning in a new computerised testing system. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 436-443.

(3) Smith, M. A., & Karpicke, J. D. (2014). Retrieval practice with short-answer, multiple-choice, and hybrid tests. Memory, 22, 784-802.

(4) Clariana, R. B., & Lee, D. (2001). The effects of recognition and recall study tasks with feedback in a computer-based vocabulary lesson. Educational Technology Research & Development, 49, 23-36.

(5) Williams, J. P. (1963). Comparison of several response modes in a review program. Journal of Educational Psychology, 54, 253-360.

(6) Gay, L. R. (1980). The comparative effects of multiple-choice versus short-answer tests on retention. Journal of Educational Measurement, 17, 45-50.

(7) McDermott, K. B., Agarwal, P. K., D'Antonio, L., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Both multiple-choice and short-answer quizzes enhance later exam performance in middle and high school classes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 20 , 3-21.

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 retrieval practice – in other words, bringing information to mind.

How does retrieval practice help learning?

Retrieval practice is beneficial in many ways. The more obvious way is that doing something like a practice quiz can help you figure out what you don’t know. That’s one example of an “indirect” benefit of retrieval practice: figuring out what you know and what you don’t know leads you to do something that causes learning.

But, lots of studies have also shown direct effects of retrieval practice: the act itself of bringing information to mind makes it more durable. For more on the various direct and indirect benefits of retrieval practice, see this post.

Later on in the podcast, you'll hear about how retrieval practice can be good for application of knowledge to new situations – not just fact learning. For more about how retrieval practice can help with complex and novel situations, see this post. Retrieval practice can also help with anxiety! (2)

Do students practice retrieval on their own?

The answer is no. While students often do use quizzes as a check of how much they've learned, very few of them list retrieval practice as their go-to study strategy (1). Why not? Well, it’s hard. While doing retrieval practice, it can feel like you don’t know much – and that feels bad. This leads students to be underconfident after practicing retrieval, compared to overconfident after re-reading. For more on this illusion, see this blog post about predicted and actual learning.

Megan tells an anecdote about students who come to her office and say they studied and studied – why didn't they do well? It’s probably because they didn't use effective study strategies!

Another reason why students may not practice retrieval as often as they should is that the benefits of retrieval are delayed. Retrieval is better in the long-run - it produces durable learning - but it might not feel like it’s “working” while students are actually doing it.

How can teachers integrate retrieval practice into their classrooms?

There are many different ways for students to practice retrieval – it doesn’t have to be with a formal quiz or test. Yana’s colleague, Dr. Miko Wilford, likes to play Jeopardy with her students to help them get ready for exams. You can also do starter or exit questions, which can be low or even no stakes. You can ask students to write from memory, answer open-ended questions, draw from memory, and even create concept maps from memory (3). Be careful with having students create their own questions, though – it may not be worth it (4). Prompting questions might also help – though not always (but at least, they shouldn’t hurt). See this blog post for Megan’s recent study on retrieval practice with prompts (5).

Students actually really like frequent quizzing once they get used to it. Megan and Dr. Cindy Nebel (formerly Cindy Wooldridge) recently went to Columbus State Community College to talk to instructors there, and one of the professors, Felicia Smith, talked about giving daily quizzes in some of her classes, and how students who’d experienced this reacted when they took her other classes in which she didn’t use daily quizzing. 

It’s a good idea to tell students why you are including so many quizzes. This helps students understand that we’re not just doing this to be mean to them! Dr. Althea Bauernschmidt always tells students:

"I quiz because I care."

(For Althea’s latest guest post on our blog, see here).

What about flashcards?

Flashcards can be a good way for students to practice retrieval on their own, but they have to make sure they are doing it properly: actually trying to retrieve, rather than just flipping the card. A group of students in Yana’s class recently claimed that making flashcards rather than using them to practice retrieval was what helped them learn. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out what happened with that hypothesis!

Image from Pixabay

For a different twist on flashcards, see this method described by college student Rachel Adragna, which goes beyond using flashcards for retrieving key terms and definitions –encouraging students instead to think more deeply and in new ways about the information they’re trying to learn.

One last thing: Students should not stop studying when they think they’ve learned the information. Repeated retrieval, even after retrieval success, is critical for long-term learning (6), (7).

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 retrieval 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) Karpicke, J. D., Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practice retrieval when they study on their own? Memory, 17, 471-479.

(2) Smith, A. M., Floerke, V. A., & Thomas, A. K. (2016). Retrieval practice protects memory against acute stress. Science, 354, 1046-1048.

(3) Blunt, J. R., & Karpicke, J. D. (2014). Learning with retrieval-based concept mapping. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106, 849-858.

(4) Weinstein, Y., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger, H. L. (2010). A comparison of study strategies for passages: Re-reading, answering questions, and generating questions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 16, 308-316.

(5) Smith, M. A., Blunt, J. R., Whiffen, J. W., & Karpicke, J. D. (2016). Does providing prompts during retrieval practice improve learning? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 30, 544-553.

(6) Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966-968. 

(7) Karpicke, J. D. (2009). Metacognitive control and strategy selection: Deciding to practice retrieval during learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138, 469-486.

This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Show Notes:

Welcome to the Learning Scientists Podcast – a podcast for teachers, students, and parents about evidence-based practice and learning.

In this episode, the two of us – Dr. Yana Weinstein (UMass Lowell) and Dr. Megan Sumeracki (formerly Megan Smith; Rhode Island College) – introduce ourselves and tell you a bit about our backgrounds, how we came to start the Learning Scientists project, and what we’ll be talking about on this podcast.

About Us

Yana was born in Russia, grew up in England, spent a bit of time in France, and moved to the US in 2008 – first to St. Louis, MO (to do a postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis with Roddy Roediger), and then to Boston 5 years ago to start her faculty position at UMass Lowell.

Megan has lived in the United States her entire life. She grew up North of Chicago, went to Purdue University for her undergraduate education, Washington University in St. Louis for her Masters, and back to Purdue for her PhD. She then took a 1-year position at Utah State University Eastern, before settling into her position at Rhode Island College.

So, we met at Washington University in St. Louis 8 years ago, but we didn’t really work together at the time. A year and a half ago, however, everything changed as we re-discovered each other on Twitter and launched the Learning Scientists project.

The Learning Scientists project

Originally, we started searching for students who wanted help studying. Did you know that once every few minutes, someone tweets asking “how to study”? See for yourselves! To learn more about how the project emerged spontaneously from our Twitter interactions, see this story.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter @AceThatTest.  

With the help of Samuel Sumeracki, a strategic communication expert – and now, Megan’s husband! – we started a website and blog. Our first blog post was called Communication Breakdown Between Science and Practice in Education. We got a variety of responses to this blog post, and in the past 18 months we’ve learned a lot and realized that we were somewhat naïve when we started the project and wrote that post. See here for our 1-year reflection post, where we elaborate on how the project evolved from that first post.

The Lab to Classroom model

In this first podcast episode, we discuss our experiences in the classroom, and debunk one of the myths surrounding cognitive psychology and education: that we only collect data in the lab. We do, in fact, start in the lab; but then, we build our way up to the classroom.

For an example of the lab to classroom model in practice, see this blog post.

Six Strategies for Effective Learning

Image by Oliver Caviglioli

In this podcast, we’ll be focusing on 6 strategies that have the most evidence supporting their effectiveness. Here are the 6 strategies, with links to our dedicated page for each strategy, where you can find posters, blog posts, and other free downloadable resources:

Spaced Practice
Retrieval Practice
Elaboration
Interleaving
Concrete Examples
Dual Coding

For more about the 6 strategies, see this blog post. Recently, we’ve been discussing these strategies with teachers and students. One of the 12 year olds we talked to in the UK even co-authored a blog post with us!

For the next 6 months, we’ll be taking one of these strategies in turn and presenting research evidence as well as implementation ideas, and hopefully providing even more opportunities for teachers, students, and parents to interact with us.

Speak to you soon!

You can leave a comment here, on any of our blog posts, and join us on Twitter and Facebook. Also, check out the FAQ page and submit your questions through the form at the bottom of that page. Check out this digest for all the different ways you can get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you.

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