Successive Relearning: An Underexplored but Potent Technique for Obtaining and Maintaining Knowledge

Abstract

Successive relearning involves practicing a task until it is performed correctly and then practicing it again until it is performed correctly during other spaced practice sessions. Despite its widespread use outside of education, few students use this approach to obtain and maintain knowledge in formal educational settings. We review evidence that demonstrates its potency and emphasize how investigations of successive relearning will shift research agendas away from single-session studies in which time on task is fixed toward studies involving multiple practice sessions in which time on task is tailored for students and is treated as an outcome variable of interest. Doing so arguably will align the outcomes of cognitive-education research with real-world learning objectives by revealing not only the benefits of using successive relearning (or any learning technique) but also the time required to obtain those benefits.

The Effect of Incentives on the Use of Successive Relearning for Retaining Statistics and Epidemiology Concepts in a Medical Research Course

“…Thus, instructors who desire to motivate their students to use a particular learning strategy for completing homework assignments can likely do so by providing a relatively small proportion of the class grade for completion. Nevertheless, strategies like successive relearning show a great deal of promise for helping students to gain mastery of 11/20 a particular topic -both in obtaining the content as well as maintaining over time (for a review, see Rawson & Dunlosky, 2022), so it may bene t students to adopt this strategy to master any content even when they are not given an incentive to do so. A question becomes, how might students be motivated to use the strategy on their own?…”

“…Does SR improve student achievement in classroom settings? Whereas SR shows much promise, only a few studies have been conducted to evaluate its e cacy (for a recent review, see Rawson & Dunlosky, 2022). For instance, in Janes et al (2020), students in an undergraduate biopsychology course were provided with a SR program that included multiple assignments, each of which consisted of 8-10 to-belearned items from the course, such as declarative concepts (e.g.…”

Correcting memory failures: Some additions.

“…He mentions retrieval practice (e.g., Karpicke & Roediger, 2008;McDermott, 2021) as one promising technique. We agree, of course, but we would especially recommend the technique of successive relearning (Rawson & Dunlosky, 2022). In this technique, students learn a set of material (say, U.S. states and their capital cities) to the criterion of one perfect recall through successive study and test trials (i.e., study-test, study-test).…”

“…In this manner, students can learn information that they must know, such as a would-be neurologist learning all parts of the nervous system and brain. Rawson and Dunlosky (2022) review studies showing that successive relearning is particularly powerful for long-term retention. Of course, cognitive psychologists have evidence for many other facts that enhance retention, too (Brown et al, 2014).…”

“…Future work is needed to determine what factors are associated with slow learning and sharp forgetting, as well as whether and how such forgetting can be overcome. Repeated study clearly will not do the trick, but successive relearning might reduce the difference in retention between fast and slow learners (Rawson & Dunlosky, 2022).…”