Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis.

Cepeda, Nicholas J.; Pashler, Harold; Vul, Edward; Wixted, John T.; Rohrer, Doug

doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354

Cited by 1,334 publications

(1,352 citation statements)

References 200 publications

(179 reference statements)

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“…Additionally, Kornell and Bjork's results have been replicated by Kang and Pashler (2012), Zulkiply and Burt (in press), and Wahlheim, Dunlosky, and Jacoby (2011). All of these findings seem to fit within an extensive literature on the spacing effect-that is, the finding that items studied once and restudied after a delay are recalled better in the long term than are items studied and restudied in quick succession (for reviews, see Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006;Dempster, 1988;Glenberg, 1979). In all of the recent studies demonstrating the benefits of spacing for inductive learning (with the exception of Vlach et al, 2008, who did not have an interleaved condition in addition to their spaced condition), however, interleavingmixing exemplars from different categories together-was what enhanced learning, rather than temporal spacing per se-a point to which we will return shortly.…”

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confidence: 56%

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

et al. 2012

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Kornell and Bjork (Psychological Science 19:585-592, 2008) found that interleaving exemplars of different categories enhanced inductive learning of the concepts based on those exemplars. They hypothesized that the benefit of mixing exemplars from different categories is that doing so highlights differences between the categories. Kang and Pashler (Applied Cognitive Psychology 26:97-103, 2012) obtained results consistent with this discriminative-contrast hypothesis: Interleaving enhanced inductive learning, but temporal spacing, which does not highlight category differences, did not. We further tested the discriminative-contrast hypothesis by examining the effects of interleaving and spacing, as well as their combined effects. In three experiments, using photographs of butterflies and birds as the stimuli, temporal spacing was harmful when it interrupted the juxtaposition of interleaved categories, even when total spacing was held constant, supporting the discriminative-contrast hypothesis. Temporal spacing also had value, however, when it did not interrupt discrimination processing.Keywords Categorization . Induction . Interleaving . Spacing . MetacognitionPeople accumulate a great deal of knowledge via inductive learning. Children, for example, learn concepts such as boat or fruit by being exposed to exemplars of those categories and inducing the commonalities that define the concepts.Later in life, we might learn to distinguish between different species of butterflies or birds, as in the present research. Such inductive learning is critical in making sense of events, objects, and actions-and, more generally, in structuring and understanding our world. In the present research, we examined how exemplars of to-be-learned categories should be sequenced and spaced in order to optimize inductive learning. Kornell and Bjork (2008) investigated the effect of study schedules on inductive learning-specifically, learning artists' painting styles from exemplars of their paintings. Images of six paintings by each of 12 artists were presented for study, with the artist's name displayed below each painting. The paintings by half of the artists were blocked (i.e., all six paintings by a given artist were shown consecutively), whereas the paintings by the other six artists were interleaved (i.e., mixed together). After the learning phase, participants were shown new paintings by each of the 12 artists and were asked to identify which artist had painted each new painting. Kornell and Bjork found that interleaving artists' paintings led to better performance on this inductive task than did blocking-even though participants consistently believed that blocking, rather than interleaving, had been more helpful for learning the artists' styles.

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confidence: 56%

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

et al. 2012

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“…In contrast, if people cannot identify past exemplars, they are less inclined to follow exemplarbased strategies (Rouder & Ratcliff, 2004). Furthermore, similar to spacing effects in memory (Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006), spacing exemplar repetitions helps when solving exemplar-based tasks (McDaniel, Fadler, & Pashler, 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

Pillars of judgment: How memory abilities affect performance in rule-based and exemplar-based judgments.

Hoffmann

Helversen

Rieskamp

2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

108

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Making accurate judgments is an essential skill in everyday life. Although how different memory abilities relate to categorization and judgment processes has been hotly debated, the question is far from resolved. We contribute to the solution by investigating how individual differences in memory abilities affect judgment performance in 2 tasks that induced rule-based or exemplar-based judgment strategies. In a study with 279 participants, we investigated how working memory and episodic memory affect judgment accuracy and strategy use. As predicted, participants switched strategies between tasks. Furthermore, structural equation modeling showed that the ability to solve rule-based tasks was predicted by working memory, whereas episodic memory predicted judgment accuracy in the exemplar-based task. Last, the probability of choosing an exemplar-based strategy was related to better episodic memory, but strategy selection was unrelated to working memory capacity. In sum, our results suggest that different memory abilities are essential for successfully adopting different judgment strategies.

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“…cramming learning sessions in immediate succession). This so-called spacing effect has been demonstrated in more than 300 published experiments (for reviews, see e.g., Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006;Delaney, Verkoeijen, & Spirgel, 2010). Most of these studies were conducted in a laboratory setting with adults learning word-pairs.…”

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Distributed Practice and Retrieval Practice in Primary School Vocabulary Learning: A Multi‐classroom Study

Goossens

Camp

Verkoeijen

et al. 2016

Applied Cognitive Psychology

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SummaryDistributed practice and retrieval practice are promising learning strategies to use in education. We examined the effects of these strategies in primary school vocabulary lessons. Grades 2, 3, 4, and 6 children performed exercises that were part of the regular curriculum. For the distributed practice manipulation, the children performed six exercises distributed within 1 week (short‐lag repetition) or across 2 weeks (long‐lag repetition). For the repetition type manipulation, children copied a part of the description of a word (restudy) or recalled the description (retrieval practice). At the end of each week, the children received a cued‐recall vocabulary test. After 1 to 11 weeks they received a multiple‐choice vocabulary test. Both on the cued‐recall test and on the multiple‐choice test no benefits of long‐lag repetition and retrieval practice were found. These results put into question the practical value of long‐lag repetition and retrieval practice in real‐life primary school vocabulary lessons.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis.

Cited by 1,334 publications

References 200 publications

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

Pillars of judgment: How memory abilities affect performance in rule-based and exemplar-based judgments.

Distributed Practice and Retrieval Practice in Primary School Vocabulary Learning: A Multi‐classroom Study

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