We examined the effects of retrieval practice for students who varied in working memory capacity as a function of the lag between study of material and its initial test, whether or not feedback was given after the test, and the retention interval of the final test. We sought to determine whether a blend of these conditions exists that maximises benefits from retrieval practice for lower and higher working memory capacity students. College students learned general knowledge facts and then restudied the facts or were tested on them (with or without feedback) at lags of 0-9 intervening items. Final cued recall performance was better for tested items than for restudied items after both 10 minutes and 2 days, particularly for longer study-test lags. Furthermore, on the 2-day delayed test the benefits from retrieval practice with feedback were significantly greater for students with lower working memory capacity than for students with higher working memory capacity (r = -.42). Retrieval practice may be an especially effective learning strategy for lower ability students.

If the mnemonic benefits of testing are to be widely realized in real-world learning circumstances, people must appreciate the value of testing and choose to utilize testing during self-guided learning. Yet metacognitive judgments do not appear to reflect the enhancement provided by testing Karpicke & Roediger (Science 319:966-968, 2008).

Three experiments demonstrated learners’ abilities to adaptively and qualitatively accommodate their encoding strategies to the demands of an upcoming test. Stimuli were word pairs. In Experiment 1, test expectancy was induced for either cued recall (of targets given cues) or free recall (of targets only) across 4 study–test cycles of the same test format, followed by a final critical cycle featuring either the expected or the unexpected test format. For final tests of both cued and free recall, participants who had expected that test format outperformed those who had not. This disordinal interaction, supported by recognition and self-report data, demonstrated not mere differences in effort based on anticipated test difficulty, but rather qualitative and appropriate differences in encoding strategies based on expected task demands. Participants also came to appropriately modulate metacognitive monitoring (Experiment 2) and study-time allocation (Experiment 3) across study–test cycles. Item and associative recognition performance, as well as self-report data, revealed shifts in encoding strategies across trials; these results were used to characterize and evaluate the different strategies that participants employed for cued versus free recall and to assess the optimality of participants’ metacognitive control of encoding strategies. Taken together, these data illustrate a sophisticated form of metacognitive control, in which learners qualitatively shift encoding strategies to match the demands of anticipated tests.

ADEPT is a 5-year project whose goals are to develop, deploy, and evaluate inquiry learning capabilities for the Alexandria Digital Library, an extant digital library of primary sources in geography. We interviewed nine geography faculty members who teach undergraduate courses about their information seeking for research and teaching and their use of information resources in teaching. These data were supplemented by interviews with four faculty members from another ADEPT study about the nature of knowledge in geography. Among our key findings are that geography faculty are more likely to encounter useful teaching resources while seeking research resources than vice versa, although the influence goes in both directions. Their greatest information needs are for research data, maps, and images. They desire better searching by concept or theme, in addition to searching by location and place name. They make extensive use of their own research resources in their teaching. Among the implications for functionality and architecture of geographic digital libraries for educational use are that personal digital libraries are essential, because individual faculty members have personalized approaches to selecting, collecting, and organizing teaching resources. Digital library services for research and teaching should include the ability to import content from common office software and to store content in standard formats that can be exported to other applications. Digital library services can facilitate sharing among faculty but cannot overcome barriers such as intellectual property rights, access to proprietary research data, or the desire of individuals to maintain control over their own resources. Faculty use of primary and secondary resources needs to be better understood if we are to design successful digital libraries for research and teaching.

Emerging “life-logging” technologies have tremendous potential to augment human autobiographical memory by recording and processing vast amounts of information from an individual’s experiences. In this experiment undergraduate participants wore a SenseCam, a small, sensor-equipped digital camera, as they went about their normal daily activities for five consecutive days. Pictures were captured either at fixed intervals or as triggered by SenseCam’s sensors. On two of five nights, participants watched an end-of-day review of a random subset of pictures captured that day. Participants were tested with a variety of memory measures at intervals of 1, 3, and 8 weeks. The most fruitful of six measures were recognition rating (on a 1–7 scale) and picture-cued recall length. On these tests, end-of-day review enhanced performance relative to no review, while pictures triggered by SenseCam’s sensors showed little difference in performance compared to those taken at fixed time intervals. We discuss the promise of SenseCam as a tool for research and for improving autobiographical memory.

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Optimizing learning over multiple retrieval opportunities requires a joint consideration of both the probability and the mnemonic value of a successful retrieval. Previous research has addressed this trade-off by manipulating the schedule of practice trials, suggesting that a pattern of increasingly long lags—“expanding retrieval practice”—may keep retrievals successful while gradually increasing their mnemonic value (Landauer & Bjork, 1978). Here we explore the trade-off issue further using an analogous manipulation of cue informativeness. After being given an initial presentation of English-Iñupiaq word pairs, participants received practice trials across which letters of the target word were either accumulated (AC), diminished (DC), or always fully present. Diminishing cues yielded the highest performance on a final test of cued recall. Additional analyses suggest that AC practice promotes potent (effortful) retrieval at the cost of success, and DC practice promotes successful retrieval at the cost of potency. Experiment 2 revealed that the negative effects of AC practice can be partly ameliorated by providing feedback after each practice trial.

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