As mentioned, the authors used a mixed-method approach. One the one hand, they asked students during the pre- and post-assessment to indicate how many minutes they had spent using successive relearning or other learning strategies, when they had started studying for the exam, their confidence in recalling specific content from the course, etc. On the other hand, they had a few open questions allowing to better understand students’ motivation for using or not using taught learning strategies:
Pre-assessment: “Imagine that your course instructor knows about an extremely effective study strategy that dramatically boosts long-term retention and learning of the course material. What would your course instructor need to do to convince you to stop using your existing study strategies and instead use this new study strategy?”
Post-assessment: “If you used successive relearning to study for the last exam, please explain why you chose to do so; if this is the first time you have used it to study for an exam, please explain what convinced you to try it.”
Post-assessment: “If you did not use successive relearning to study for the last exam, please explain why you chose not to do so and what the instructor could have done to convince you to try it.”
As part of the in-class intervention, students learned about the research behind successive relearning and how the demonstration they worked on in the previous sessions was linked to that strategy. They were also told how they could apply the strategy (e.g., using flashcards, making study schedules) and were shown research on other – less effective – strategies.
