{"id":473,"date":"2025-04-19T21:40:10","date_gmt":"2025-04-19T21:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jobs.qalamscholar.com\/?p=473"},"modified":"2025-04-19T21:40:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-19T21:40:10","slug":"retrieval-practice-improves-learning-but-will-it-help-all-of-my-students-more-experimental-evidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jobs.qalamscholar.com\/?p=473","title":{"rendered":"Retrieval Practice Improves Learning, But Will it Help ALL of My Students? More Experimental Evidence"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cover image by <\/em>Prawny<\/em><\/a> from <\/em>Pixabay<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

By Megan Sumeracki<\/em><\/p>\n

In the first year that our blog was created\u20142016\u2014I wrote a piece titled, Retrieval Practice Improves Learning, But Will it Help ALL of My Students?<\/a> In this piece, I covered an experiment conducted by Pooja Agarwal and colleagues (1) about the benefits of retrieval practice for students with different working memory capacities. The main question was whether retrieval practice would benefit students with a wide range of working memory capacity\u2014or the ability to hold information in mind and engage in attentional control. It is reasonable to ask whether retrieval practice, given the needed balance of success and difficulty, might benefit students with higher working memory ability more\u2014a rich get richer situation. If retrieval practice only benefits certain types of students, then it would be important to know that! Thankfully, that was not what they found. <\/p>\n

The main findings were that retrieval practice led to greater performance on a learning assessment than repeated \u201cstudying\u201d or reading, and this was true whether the students had lower or higher working memory capacities (1)<\/em>. In fact, when the learning assessment was completed one week after learning, they students with lower working memory capacity actually benefited more from retrieval practice than those with higher working memory capacity. The authors argued that retrieval practice was beneficial for students with a range of working memory ability, not just students with higher working memory capacity. <\/p>\n

In today\u2019s post, I cover another research article asking whether retrieval practice is equally beneficial for students with different skills. Bruna Fernanda Tolentino Moreira and colleagues (2)<\/em> conducted two experiments, one each with 4th and 6th grade children, investigating whether retrieval practice was equally beneficial for students with different visual word decoding skills. The authors note that children\u2019s visual word decoding abilities tend to differ dramatically, even when looking at children in the same age range. If retrieval practice is less effective, not effective, or harmful for learning for some children, it is important to know this!<\/p>\n

The Experiments<\/h1>\n

Experiments 1 and 2 were very similar. Experiment 1 was conducted with 6th graders, and experiment 2 was conducted with 4th graders. There were a couple of other differences: In Experiment 2 a few additional measures were included. The children also practiced retrieval and restudied twice rather than just once in, and only completed one final assessment test instead of two. However, the methods were largely the same, and the main findings were also the same across experiments.<\/p>\n

Experimental Retrieval Practice Procedure:<\/h2>\n

Children first participated in a typical retrieval practice experimental procedure. The children first read a text passage about the sun twice\u2014once by themselves and once along with the experimenter. Then, after a brief distraction task (solving math problems), the children practiced retrieval for some of the information in the text and reread other information (the retrieval practice and restudying conditions, respectively). During retrieval practice the children were given a cued-recall test; they saw sentences from the text passage with key words removed, and they were asked to remember the word. During restudy, the word was presented in bold font within the sentence.<\/p>\n

For example, when the words Hydrogen<\/em> and photosphere<\/em> were assigned to the retrieval practice condition, they looked like this:<\/p>\n