Taken together, what does this tell us?
1) We need to be paying attention to the interaction of learning strategies on motivational factors. Motivation matters both for student participation in course material but also for self-directed learning.
2) Jumping straight to practice is (maybe) ok to do. When I first read this article, I was thinking about how skipping the lecture was like skipping the explicit instruction and jumping straight to an inquiry approach. And in some ways, it is. But practice with feedback also includes important elements of explicit instruction. Participants are being explicitly told the answer after each problem. Still, there are a lot of instructors who probably use something like this as their inquiry approach.
However, I caution educators not to ditch explicit instruction altogether as I’m concerned there may be some interactions here yet to be uncovered. For example, there could be an interaction with cognitive load. Maybe these problems were relatively easy and more complicated material or students with lower prior knowledge wouldn’t show the same effects.
3) Practice matters. Across all studies, the conditions that included retrieval practice far outperformed lecture only conditions. It is not enough to just lecture. Students need that knowledge reinforced through retrieval practice.
