Principles of cognitive science in education: The effects of generation, errors, and feedback

Abstract

Principles of cognitive science hold the promise of helping children to study more effectively, yet they do not always make successful transitions from the laboratory to applied settings and have rarely been tested in such settings. For example, self-generation of answers to questions should help children to remember. But what if children cannot generate anything? And what if they make an error? Do these deviations from the laboratory norm of perfect generation hurt, and, if so, do they hurt enough that one should, in practice, spurn generation? Can feedback compensate, or are errors catastrophic? The studies reviewed here address three interlocking questions in an effort to better implement a computer-based study program to help children learn: (1) Does generation help? (2) Do errors hurt if they are corrected? And (3) what is the effect of feedback? The answers to these questions are: Yes, generation helps; no, surprisingly, errors that are corrected do not hurt; and, finally, feedback is beneficial in verbal learning. These answers may help put cognitive scientists in a better position to put their well-established principles in the service of children's learning.

Providing corrective feedback during retrieval practice does not increase retrieval-induced forgetting

“…For example, providing feedback in class (e.g., when instructors return exams to the students) may require instructors to sacrifice some lecture time. But given that errors are almost never corrected spontaneously in the absence of feedback (Metcalfe & Kornell, 2007), and retrieval-induced forgetting can occur without overt retrieval (e.g., a student receives an in-class quiz but does not produce a response, Storm & Nestojko, 2010), we believe that forfeiting some lecture time is a reasonable sacrifice.…”

Do testing effects change over time? Insights from immediate and delayed retrieval speed

“…For example, learners benefit less from restudying a foreign vocabulary and its translation than from retrieving the translation from memory like on a test (e.g., Carrier & Pashler, 1992;Metcalfe & Kornell, 2007).…”

Improving the writing skills of college students

“…Deliberate practice requires that students be provided with knowledge of the results of their work. Such feedback is recognized as a powerful learning aid (see Metcalfe & Kornell, 2007), but it poses special problems in the context of grading written texts. Although there are probably many reasons why more writing is not routinely assigned, the time and effort required by instructors to provide useful feedback surely ranks high on the list.…”