Retrieval Practice in Classroom Settings: A Review of Applied Research

Abstract

Tests have been vastly used for the assessment of learning in educational contexts. Recently, however, a growing body of research has shown that the practice of remembering previously studied information (i.e., retrieval practice) is more advantageous for long-term retention than restudying that same information; a phenomenon often termed "testing effect." The question remains, however, whether such practice can be useful to improve learning in actual educational contexts, and whether in these contexts specific types of tests are particularly beneficial. We addressed these issues by reviewing studies that investigated the use of retrieval practice as a learning strategy in actual educational contexts. The studies reviewed here adopted from free-recall to multiple-choice tests, and involved from elementary school children to medical school students. In general, their results are favorable to the use of retrieval practice in classroom settings, regardless of whether feedback is provided or not. Importantly, however, the majority of the reviewed studies compared retrieval practice to repeated study or to "no-activity." The results of the studies comparing retrieval practice to alternative control conditions were less conclusive, and a subset of them found no advantage for tests. These findings raise the question whether retrieval practice is more beneficial than alternative learning strategies, especially learning strategies and activities already adopted in classroom settings (e.g., concept mapping). Thus, even though retrieval practice emerges as a promising strategy to improve learning in classroom environments, there is not enough evidence available at this moment to determine whether it is as beneficial as alternative learning activities frequently adopted in classroom settings.

Gaining Mathematical Understanding: The Effects of Creative Mathematical Reasoning and Cognitive Proficiency

“…The performance difference between retrieval practice and other ways of attaining information-most commonly re-reading-is denoted as the "testing effect." The testing effect is supported by both behavioral and functional fMRI evidence (for overviews, see Dunlosky et al, 2013;van den Broek et al, 2016;Adesope et al, 2017;Antony et al, 2017;Moreira et al, 2019;Jonsson et al, 2020). Research that currently underway shows that measures of brain activity following the testing effect (retrieval practice > study) and the "CMR effect" (CMR > AR) indicate that the same brain areas are activated.…”

The Forward Testing Effect is Reliable and Independent of Learners’ Working Memory Capacity

“…However, tests can also be used to enhance learning and retention. This has been demonstrated in both basic research in the laboratory (for reviews, see Karpicke, 2017; Roediger & Butler, 2011; Rowland, 2014) and applied research in educational contexts (for reviews, see Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013; Moreira, Pinto & Starling, 2019). Thereby, testing can have both direct and indirect effects on long-term learning and retention (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006a).…”

Does Item Difficulty Affect the Magnitude of the Retrieval Practice Effect? An Evaluation of the Retrieval Effort Hypothesis

“…Fourth, we may have inserted a confounding factor in our Experiment 2's design, since the number of cycles on practice phase co-varied with the difficulty, namely, four cycles for easy items and six cycles for difficult items. Karpicke and Roediger (2008) showed that, after a first correct recall of a foreign word, repeated retrieval practice is the key factor for improving memory on a delayed criterion test, probably because repeated restudy is a "shallow" encoding strategy (for a discussion about control conditions in retrieval practice literature, see Moreira et al, 2019). If only retrieval practice cycles conceive additional benefits for later memory, we may have inadvertently biased conditions in favor of difficult items in Experiment 2.…”

“…We were aware that this could be a problem, but we kept this design feature in order to avoid another concern, namely, fatigue effects resulting from a rather long experiment. Future studies could extend our experiments by either (a) equally increasing both the number of successful recalls and the number of cycles for easy and difficult items, so that the items differ only in relation to the type and practice and item difficulty, or (b) comparing retrieval practice with "deeper" encoding strategies (Moreira et al, 2019).…”

“…These benefits occur across a wide range of materials, contexts, criterion tests, and learners' characteristics (Dunlosky et al, 2013), and tend to be even greater when feedback is provided during retrieval practice, especially under conditions in which initial retrieval rate is lower (Rowland, 2014). Furthermore, retrieval practice seems promising in educational settings (Moreira et al, 2019) and in cognitive rehabilitation of patients with language (Middleton et al, 2016) and memory impairments (Sumowski et al, 2010).…”