by Cindy Nebel
(Cover image from Pixabay by squarefrog.)
We have so many blogs about retrieval practice. In fact, it is the most common tag we use on our blog. If you’re new to this conversation, you can find some summary information about the benefits of retrieval practice here and some additional resources here. In short, there is a wealth of research demonstrating that retrieving information helps individuals retain information better than restudying.
But not always…
One thing that we try to emphasize is that there are no silver bullets. It’s so important to understand the mechanisms that underlie any strategy we’re recommending because when you go to apply it the why it works becomes super important. No strategy works all the time. Not even retrieval practice. (You can see other times we’ve talked about that fact here and here.
Today I want to share a new Open Access article (so you can go read it for yourself if you’d like!) that *spoiler alert! found a situation in which restudying was actually better for retention than retrieval (1).
This study used Swahili-English word pairs for their materials. This is a pretty common strategy when we’re trying to figure out basic mechanisms. Most of our participants don’t have a background in Swahili so it allows us to see how they learn something from scratch instead of worrying about people who might have already known something when the experiment began. Still, there are some limitations here because most of us do not ask our students to memorize foreign language vocab pairs exclusively or at all.
In this study, there were a few experiments. I’m just going to tell you about the first one here. In the first experiment, people were recruited online and participated in five sessions. During the first session, they studied the 40 word pairs. Then on Days 3, 5, and 7 they were given the words in different ways. Some of the word pairs were restudied, but for others the Swahili word was presented and students either just thought about or wrote down the English pair before being shown the correct answer. They labeled these Restudy, Covert Retrieval, and Overt Retrieval. After each restudied word, participants were asked, “Would you have remembered the correct translation?” and rated it out of 100. For the Retrieval groups they were asked how close they were to the correct answer (again, out of 100).
On Day 9, everyone took a final test. And the strangest thing happened…
