How the Amount and Spacing of Retrieval Practice Affect the Short- and Long-Term Retention of Mathematics Knowledge

Lyle, Keith B.; Bego, Campbell R.; Hopkins, Robin F.; Hieb, Jeffrey L.; Ralston, Patricia A. S.

doi:10.1007/s10648-019-09489-x

Cited by 53 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…To sum up, due to the procedural nature of solving arithmetic tasks, the effect of distributed practice on mathematical skills might be less pronounced or even absent (but see Chen et al, 2018, or Lyle et al, 2019, for positive effects). Further research is necessary to examine the effect of distributed practice on procedural skills, also including procedures from different subjects and a more fine-grained grading of ISI and RI.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The target skills addressed in the quizzes and the final exams involved declarative knowledge (e.g., understanding the definition of a logarithmic function) and procedural skills (e.g., solving quadratic equations by factoring and the zero product property). The spacing of quizzes referring to previously learned pre-calculus units across the whole duration of the course led to a better performance in the subsequent exams than massing the quizzes (for a similar study, see Lyle et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

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No Robust Effect of Distributed Practice on the Short- and Long-Term Retention of Mathematical Procedures

Ebersbach¹,

Nazari²

2020

Front. Psychol.

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We investigated the effect of distributed practice and more specifically the "lag effect" concerning the retention of mathematical procedures. The lag effect implies that longer retention intervals benefit from longer inter-study intervals (ISIs). University students (N = 235) first learned how to solve permutation tasks and then practiced this procedure with an ISI of zero (i.e., massed), one, or 11 days. The final test took place after one or five weeks. All conditions were manipulated between-subjects. Contrary to our expectations, the analyses revealed no effect of distributed practice and therewith also no lag effect, even though the sample size was sufficiently large. The only significant effect was that test performance was poorer after 5 weeks than after 1 week. In view of the present results and those of other studies, we assume that distributed practice works differently for declarative and procedural knowledge, with less robust of even absent effects when procedural skills are practiced with ISIs compared to massed practice.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

No Robust Effect of Distributed Practice on the Short- and Long-Term Retention of Mathematical Procedures

Ebersbach¹,

Nazari²

2020

Front. Psychol.

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“…These include a study with third-and seventh-grade students (Barzagar Nazari & Ebersbach, 2019), two studies fully embedded within a college pre-calculus course (Hopkins et al, 2016;Lyle et al, 2020), and a study in a college statistics course (Ebersbach & Barzagar Nazari, 2020b).…”

Section: The Spacing Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaced mathematics practice improves test scores and reduces overconfidence

Emeny¹,

Hartwig

Rohrer

2021

Applied Cognitive Psychology

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The practice assignments in a mathematics textbook or course can be arranged so that most of the problems relating to any particular concept are massed together in a single assignment, or these related problems can be distributed across many assignments-a format known as spaced practice. Here we report the results of two classroom experiments that assessed the effects of mathematics spacing on both test scores and students' predictions of their test scores. In each experiment, students in Year 7 (11-12 years of age) either massed their practice into a single session or divided their practice across three sessions spaced 1 week apart, followed 1 month later by a test. In both experiments, spaced practice produced higher test scores than did massed practice, and test score predictions were relatively accurate after spaced practice yet grossly overconfident after massed practice.

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“…Research also indicates that spacing retrieval practice over multiple sessions is generally more effective than the administration of a single testing session of the same duration, and that the spacing of sessions is most effective when the lag between sessions is longer and is distributed and spaced through time rather than completed in close succession (Rawson, Vaughn, & Carpenter, 2014;Roediger & Butler, 2011;Lyle et al, 2019).…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We hypothesized that practice would be more strongly associated with performance on the criterial test the longer the time lag between the retrieval session and the criterial test. Longer intervals have been considered to increase storage strength (Soderstrom & Bjork 2015) because longer intervals allow not only for the retrieval of related information but may also promote the integration of information with prior knowledge (Lyle et al 2019).…”

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Mathematics Problem Solving through Test Practice: a Randomized Field Experiment on a Global Scale

Avvisati

Borgonovi

2020

Educ Psychol Rev

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We measure the effect of a single test practice on 15-year-old students' ability to solve mathematics problems using large, representative samples of the schooled population in 32 countries. We exploit three unique features of the 2012 administration of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a large-scale, low-stakes international assessment. During the 2012 PISA administration, participating students were asked to sit two separate tests consisting of problem-solving tasks. Both tests included questions that covered the same internationally recognized and validated framework for mathematics assessment. Students were randomly assigned in the first, 2-h-long test to one of three test versions containing varying amounts of mathematics, reading, and science problems. We found that the amount of mathematics problems in the first test had a small positive effect on mean mathematics performance on the second test, but no effect on general reasoning and problem-solving ability. Subject-specific effects of test practice on subsequent test performance were found over both short lags (same day) and medium lags (1-7 days). The learning gains ascribed to mathematics problem-solving practice were larger for boys than for girls.

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How the Amount and Spacing of Retrieval Practice Affect the Short- and Long-Term Retention of Mathematics Knowledge

Cited by 53 publications

References 39 publications

No Robust Effect of Distributed Practice on the Short- and Long-Term Retention of Mathematical Procedures

No Robust Effect of Distributed Practice on the Short- and Long-Term Retention of Mathematical Procedures

Spaced mathematics practice improves test scores and reduces overconfidence

Learning Mathematics Problem Solving through Test Practice: a Randomized Field Experiment on a Global Scale

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