Abstract
Over 100 years of research shows that retrieval practice is highly effective for enhancing student learning. When managing their own study behaviors, however, students tend to avoid using retrieval practice as a way of learning. Understanding and improving students’ study decisions is important given the increasingly autonomous nature of educational experiences that require students to initiate and regulate their own learning. This review summarizes the emerging research on interventions designed to increase students’ decisions to use retrieval practice. Informing students about the benefits of retrieval, and even providing opportunities to directly experience retrieval, are not sufficient for getting students to engage with retrieval when they have the choice. However, reducing the effort and errors involved in retrieval, and providing students direct performance feedback on their own learning benefits associated with retrieval, can increase students’ decisions to use it. The small but growing literature on multifaceted interventions also shows some promise for increasing students’ decisions to use retrieval practice in their courses as a result of learning about its benefits, planning how to use it, practicing it over time, and reflecting on the outcomes. Suggestions are offered for how this research informs straightforward ways that teachers might encourage students to use retrieval practice in their own learning.
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Notes
A follow-up study using different text passages involved a final fill-in-the-blank test 48 h after learning and found that performance was not significantly different for passages that had been learned via retrieval vs. restudy (Kirk-Johnson et al., 2019, Study 3). It was noted, however, that benefits of retrieval may have been reduced due to the difficulty of the text passages (with initial retrieval performance at 55%) and the absence of corrective feedback during initial retrieval.
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This material is based upon work supported by the James S. McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Science Initiative in Understanding Human Cognition, Collaborative Grant No. 220020483.
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Carpenter, S.K. Encouraging Students to Use Retrieval Practice: a Review of Emerging Research from Five Types of Interventions. Educ Psychol Rev 35, 96 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09811-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09811-8