Practice and Forgetting Effects on Vocabulary Memory: An Activation-Based Model of the Spacing Effect

Pavlik, Philip I.; Anderson, John R.

doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_14

Cited by 234 publications

(297 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…In the past several years, there has been growing interest in identifying the conditions that lead to robust learning (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007;Pavlik & Anderson, 2005). A consistent finding is that conditions that promote increased attention or engagement during learning result in better long-term retention of material.…”

Section: Hypothesis 2: Dissociation Of Processes Underlying Immediatementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is therefore not surprising that testing immediately after practice results in better performance than does testing after a delay. When a test is administered after a significant delay (typically 1 day or more, depending on the instructional and test conditions), however, the effect of spaced versus massed practice is reversed: Studying an item over widely spaced intervals leads to better long-term retention (Pavlik & Anderson, 2005;Schmidt & Bjork, 1992). Spaced practice thus appears to constitute another "desirable difficulty.…”

Section: Hypothesis 2: Dissociation Of Processes Underlying Immediatementioning

confidence: 99%

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Measuring incremental changes in word knowledge: Experimental validation and implications for learning and assessment

Frishkoff

Collins-Thompson

Perfetti

et al. 2008

Behavior Research Methods

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Knowledge of words is essential to success in early education, and it provides an important foundation for learning throughout adulthood (NRP, 2000;Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986). For example, Feingold (1983) found that vocabulary scores in high school predict 35%-40% of the variance in college GPA, which suggests that the breadth of a person's vocabulary is critical to academic success. Vocabulary also plays an important role in the mastery of particular subjects: From astronomy to zoology, practically every domain requires a thorough understanding of words and their meanings.Given the importance of word knowledge, a fundamental question is how word meanings are acquired. When and how are specific cognitive and linguistic processes engaged during meaning acquisition? What conditions lead to successful word learning? These questions open up a rich set of topics with relevance for semantic theory, language learning, and instructional tools to support vocabulary development.In the present article, we describe a new method for the assessment of word knowledge, the Markov estimation of semantic association (MESA), and show how this method can be used to expose the trajectory of word learning over time, providing a sensitive tool for studying psychological processes in word learning. We describe results using MESA scores from an experiment that was designed to elicit changes in word knowledge across multiple sentence contexts. After learners had read each sentence, they were asked to generate the meaning of the target word. The accuracy of the meaning derivation was scored using a continuous scale, in which accuracy was a function of how closely the response resembled the correct (dictionary) meaning. Because the definition-scoring measure that is generated by MESA is continuous, it can represent gradual changes in knowledge. We discuss how the trajectory of word learning is affected by the manipulation of instructional contexts, with a focus on the robustness of learning in the presence of misleading contexts (i.e., malapropisms). We further consider how these effects may vary as a function of individual differences in vocabulary and reading-comprehension skill. The Incremental Nature of Word LearningOne important aspect of word learning is that knowledge of word meanings typically accrues gradually, over The goal of this study was to test a new technique for assessing vocabulary development. This technique is based on an algorithm for scoring the accuracy of word definitions using a continuous scale (Collins-Thompson & Callan, 2007). In an experiment with adult learners, target words were presented in six different sentence contexts, and the number of informative versus misleading contexts was systematically manipulated. Participants generated a target definition after each sentence, and the definition-scoring algorithm was used to assess the degree of accuracy on each trial. We observed incremental improvements in definition accuracy across trials. Moreover, learning curves were sensitive to the proportion of misleadin...

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Section: Hypothesis 2: Dissociation Of Processes Underlying Immediatementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Hypothesis 2: Dissociation Of Processes Underlying Immediatementioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring incremental changes in word knowledge: Experimental validation and implications for learning and assessment

Frishkoff

Collins-Thompson

Perfetti

et al. 2008

Behavior Research Methods

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“…In this account, the learning potentiation effect for a given session would be defined relative to the later part of the proceeding session, in which trial-to-trial learning potential is diminished as a result of fatigue. For a model that implements similar mechanisms in accounting for the effects of spaced practice on accuracy in foreign vocabulary learning, see Pavlik and Anderson (2005). Alternatively, or in addition to its effect on learning rate, fatigue may result in slowed (i.e., less optimal) performance toward the end of a practice session.…”

Section: Candidate Theoretical Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forgetting and learning potentiation: Dual consequences of between-session delays in cognitive skill learning.

Rickard

2007

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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In the cognitive skill literature, between-session delays have been treated either as having a negligible effect on performance or as causing forgetting. In contrast, in the procedural skill literature, overnight between-session delays can result in performance gains. In 5 multi-session data sets, the author demonstrates that neither of these 2 models holds for the case of cognitive skill learning. Instead, the delay between sessions appeared to yield both forgetting and enhanced potential for new learning. Two candidate classes of explanation are considered, and implications for the empirical law of learning are discussed.Keywords: skill, learning law, forgetting, fatigue, consolidation Most naturalistic skill acquisition requires multiple practice sessions over many days. A complete theory of human skill must therefore account for the effects of the delays between sessions on learning and performance. Yet, in the cognitive skill acquisition literature, these effects are typically ignored, with the implicit assumption that they have negligible impact on performance. One important exception is work by Anderson, Fincham, and Douglass (1999). In a multisession problem-solving task, they showed that response times (RTs) exhibit the classic decelerating speedup function within each practice session but exhibit slowing at the start of each new session, yielding a scalloped speedup pattern over sessions. The simplest case model of this effect would assume that the (nonlinear) learning rate is constant over repetitions and that the forgetting rate is constant over time. Anderson et al. (1999) provide one possible implementation of that model in their latency equation (p. 1122). It follows from that equation that the mean RTs that are predicted by extrapolating from the fit to one session must fall below the population mean RTs of all subsequent sessions, as represented in Figure 1. Stated differently, the RTs after a delay must be above the RTs that would have been expected had all of the practice occurred within a single session.There are two opposing traditions about the effects of delays between sessions in the procedural skill literature, in which commonly studied tasks include repetition of a sequence of finger movements (e.g., Walker, Brakefield, Morgan, Hobson, & Stickgold, 2002), movement of a stylus or cursor between specified points (e.g., Brashers-Krug, Shadmehr, & Bizzi, 1996), and rotary pursuit (e.g. Bourne & Archer, 1956). On one hand, in the older literature exploring the phenomena of reminiscence and warm-up decrements, the general finding is similar to that reached by Anderson et al. (1999); provided that practice within the first session is distributed (e.g., a 40-s break between each 10-s trial), an overnight delay between sessions can result in worsened performance (e.g., Adams, 1952;Digman, 1959). On the other hand, in the more recent literature on procedural consolidation (for reviews, see Stickgold, 2005;Walker & Stickgold, 2006), the delay between practice sessions has been shown to result in p...

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“…These multiple repetitions were spaced out and distributed practice leads to significant improvements in memory overall (e.g. Cepeda et al, 2006;Glenberg, 1976;Pavlik & Anderson, 2005). Given the overall frequency and spacing of trials with LF characters, it seems unlikely that they were not chunked by the end of training.…”

Section: Discounting Alternative Explanationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As it turns out, memory strength is not a simple function of frequency of exposure. Rather, memory strength is influenced by many aspects of the learning procedure, such as the type of practice (restudy vs retrieval; Carrier & Pashler, 1992;Liu, Liang, Li, & Reder, 2014;Roediger & Karpicke, 2006;Rowland, 2014), the spacing of repetitions (massed vs distributed; Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006;Glenberg, 1976;Pavlik & Anderson, 2005), and the delay between study and testing (immediate vs delayed testing; Bahrick, 1979).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Frequency Effects on Memory: A Resource-Limited Theory

Popov¹,

Reder²

2018

Preprint

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We present a review of frequency effects in memory, accompanied by a theory of memory, according to which the storage of new information in long-term memory (LTM) depletes a limited pool of working memory (WM) resources as an inverse function of item strength. We support the theory by showing that items with stronger representations in LTM (e.g. high frequency items) are easier to store, bind to context, and bind to one another; that WM resources are involved in storage and retrieval from LTM; that WM capacity is greater for stronger, more familiar stimuli. We present a novel analysis of preceding item strength, in which we show from eight existing studies that memory for an item is higher if during study it was preceded by a stronger item (e.g. a high frequency word; HF). This effect is cumulative (the more prior items are HF, the better), continuous (memory proportional to word frequency of preceding item), interacts with current item strength (larger for weaker items) and interacts with lag (decreases as the lag between the current and prior study item increases). A computational model that implements the theory is presented, which accounts for these effects. We discuss related phenomena that the model/theory can explain.

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Practice and Forgetting Effects on Vocabulary Memory: An Activation-Based Model of the Spacing Effect

Cited by 234 publications

References 45 publications

Measuring incremental changes in word knowledge: Experimental validation and implications for learning and assessment

Measuring incremental changes in word knowledge: Experimental validation and implications for learning and assessment

Forgetting and learning potentiation: Dual consequences of between-session delays in cognitive skill learning.

Frequency Effects on Memory: A Resource-Limited Theory

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