By Megan Sumeracki
Today’s post features a set of experiments conducted by Catherine Fritz and colleagues (1) with preschool children. We have actually cited this paper a few times on our blog, when we covered why the spacing effect has failed to make it into mainstream practice (Part 1, Part 2), and when I wrote about whether retrieval practice is likely to help all of our students learn (see here). However, we have yet to write in detail about the design and results of the experiments in this paper, and we know there is interest in understanding how the most effective learning strategies may work for different types of learners.
Compared to older children, preschool children are easily distracted, are poor at predicting how much they will remember, and tend to forget things quickly (1). Preschool children also do not tend to attempt to adopt effective learning strategies on their own. Given all of this, it is important to understand whether relatively simple strategies, like spacing and retrieval practice, can be implemented in preschool classrooms to help preschool children retain more of what they are learning in school.
Interestingly, the four of us Learning Scientists have observed that when speaking to preschool-aged children, adults often tend to implement retrieval practice naturally (even if they are not intentionally using the strategy). When talking with very young kids, we often say things like “what color is this?” or “what does the cow say?”. Given that, at least anecdotally, many are already doing this with preschool-aged children, it is useful to know whether this truly helps them learn and remember, like it does for older kids. If so, then teachers and parents can use spaced retrieval even more with preschool-aged children.
The goal of this set of experiments was to investigate whether spaced retrieval practice with preschool children would help them learn. Specifically, the authors tested expanding retrieval practice, where the first retrieval attempts are closely spaced, and the amount of space between subsequent retrieval attempts gets larger (i.e., the spacing expands).
