Practice assignments improve research comprehension skills and reinforce concept learning.

Abstract

Empirical research comprehension is important for undergraduate students in many scientific domains. In the present pair of classroom studies, students completed a series of either three or nine structured reading worksheet assignments (RWs) designed to implement deliberate and distributed practice of research article comprehension. In line with our previous work (Kershaw et al., 2018(Kershaw et al., , 2020, students improved across the course of the semester on multiple article comprehension tasks. Extending previous work, students demonstrated greater learning of course concepts that were reinforced by RW assignments compared to course concepts that were presented in lecture alone. Our findings suggest improvement in research article comprehension can occur after a relatively small number of practice sessions. Further, our findings are in line with past literature that learning is best when information is reinforced in multiple contexts. Implications for instruction are discussed.