By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel
I’m in the middle of preparing for the fast-approaching academic year. Together with a colleague, I will be teaching a brand-new course (‘Life Lab: The Art and Science of Thriving‘) and I’m looking forward to it. As part of my preparation I tend to take stock of activities I’d like to keep, improve, stop, or start. The ultimate goal for me is that my students have a positive learning experience and develop their self-regulated learning. I looked back at pieces I wrote and came across one that looked at a study on student ability, spaced practice, and self-regulation. Because I will be teaching students with low to no prior knowledge in my course, the findings of that study helps inform my practice.
Action Required: Call For Sharing Teaching Practice! I thought it would be great if we crowdsourced activities in teaching that educators around the world are planning to keep, improve, stop, and start (KISS) this academic year. I will use your input to write a blog post about it to share your teaching practice examples with a wider audience. If you are interested in contributing to this, please fill out the KISS form. Thanks.
I hope you enjoy the repost of a piece that was originally published on 29 May 2020.
Recap: Researching spaced practice
When researchers investigate spaced practice, they usually manipulate the time between two or more learning sessions and investigate the effect of different spacings on final memory performance. For example, they would set up three spacing conditions – no spacing between learning sessions, 1 day between learning sessions, 1 week between learning sessions – and randomly assign students to one of these conditions. Later, all students take the same final test and the test scores are compared between conditions. Using this approach, we can draw conclusions about whether spacing between study sessions leads to better test performance. Many experiments of this kind show large benefits of spacing one’s study sessions. While these experiments are a vital starting point for practical recommendations, it is important to cross validate the findings using different research approaches and to investigate natural student behavior as it occurs in real learning environments.
