Abstract
Educators often face serious time constraints that impede multiple repetition lessons on the same material. Thus, it would be useful to know when to schedule a single repetition unit to maximize memory performance. Laboratory studies revealed that the length of the retention interval (i.e., the time between the last learning session and the final memory test) dictates the optimal lag between two learning sessions. The present study tests the generalizability of this finding to vocabulary learning in secondary school. Sixth-graders were retaught English–German vocabulary after lags of 0, 1, or 10 days and tested 7 or 35 days later. In line with our predictions, we found that the optimal lag depends on the retention interval: Given a 7-day retention interval, students performed best when relearning occurred after 1 day. When vocabulary was tested after 35 days, however, students benefited from lags of both 1 and 10 days. Model-based analyses show that enhanced encoding processes and stronger resistance to forgetting—but not better retrieval processes—underlie the benefits of optimal lag. Our findings have practical implications for classroom instruction and suggest that review units should be planned carefully by taking the time of the final test into consideration.
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Notes
Massed practice means that the entire study time is crammed into one single learning session and the same material is repeatedly studied over and over (i.e., studying the same material for 4 h on Tuesday). Spaced practice allocates the same study time to different learning sessions which, for example, take place on different days (i.e., studying 2 h on Monday and 2 h on Tuesday).
Note that the research on the lag effect should be distinguished from a line of work that focuses on the benefits of blocked versus nonblocked teaching. In the latter line of research, different pieces of information are presented either within a single large session or allocated to multiple, but shorter sessions (Randler et al. 2008; Lawrence and McPherson 2000). In the current paper, in contrast, we investigate after which lag newly learned information should be repeated given that the goal is to retrieve this information after a pre-defined retention interval without further study.
To revisit, Cepeda et al.’s (2008) findings suggest that the optimal lag for a test administered 35 days after practice is 11 days. However, due to the predetermined school schedule, it was not possible to realize a relearning session 11 days after the initial learning session. Therefore, the longest lag was 10 days instead.
Three of the excluded participants were in the 10_7 condition (i.e., 10 days lag and 7 days retention interval), three were in the 0_35 condition, three were in the 10_35 condition, and two were in the 1_35 condition. We ran analyses on 7 out of the 11 excluded students for which we collected valid cued recall performance at the end of the first learning session. We compared their mean in cued recall at the end of the first learning session (M = 18.14) to the mean of the students that were used in the final analyses (M = 19.05). There was no systematic difference in regard to their initial memory performance, t(70) = −.43, p = .672.
For detailed information see http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mozer/index.php?dir=/Research/Projects/Optimization%20of%20learning/.
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Acknowledgments
The authors express their gratitude to the school principal, Mr. Michael Hohenadel, to the teachers, and the students of the Elisabeth secondary school in Mannheim for making this study possible. We thank the graduate students of the first author’s service learning seminar, Dagmar Klein, Martin Knab, Sharmila Pushpakanthan, Sonja Sobott, and Sarah Zelt, for data collection and four anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.
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Küpper-Tetzel, C.E., Erdfelder, E. & Dickhäuser, O. The lag effect in secondary school classrooms: Enhancing students’ memory for vocabulary. Instr Sci 42, 373–388 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-013-9285-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-013-9285-2