The Importance of Practicing Retrieval for Learning

MEGAN SUMERACKI: Welcome to the Learning Scientist Podcast, a podcast for teachers, students, and parents about evidence-based practice and learning.

YANA WEINSTEIN: The Learning Scientist Podcast is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: Hi. I'm Dr. Megan Sumeracki, a professor at Rhode Island College.

YANA WEINSTEIN: And I'm Dr. Yana Weinstein, a professor at UMass Lowell.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: And together, we co-founded the Learning Scientists. We apply cognitive psychology to education for teachers, students, and parents but today's episode is specifically for students. We're going to be talking about how we can take the research on learning and memory and apply it to student studying to try to improve how much you're learning and how well you're performing on tests and exams, as well as other types of assessments.

YANA WEINSTEIN: So, we're assuming that students at different stages in their education might be listening to this. You might be still in high school, you might be at the beginning of your college career or maybe towards the end. Or maybe you're in a different stage of your life, but still learning something. We hope that this episode will be applicable regardless of what age you are or what you're studying. We're going to be talking about a few different strategies that are based in research from cognitive psychology that has been conducted over the past few decades. So, the strategies we'll be talking about are ones that have been repeatedly demonstrated as effective. First of all, we'd like to talk to you about two very important strategies. They're called spaced practice and retrieval practice. Don't worry about that specific terminology. We'll define it and repeat the definitions as we go through the podcast episode.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: And so there are six and you can use them all together. But if you were only going to start with two and probably you want to start with just a couple. It's going to be difficult for you to listen to one podcast and then completely overhaul the way you are studying or trying to guide your own independent learning. So if you're just going to take two, spaced practice and retrieval practice really are the gold standard study strategies. They're the ones that have the most evidence to support their effectiveness. These are the two strategies that are the most widely applicable to students at different stages within their education and also across different subjects, from history to math, to engineering,

YANA WEINSTEIN: to sport,

MEGAN SUMERACKI: to psychology,

YANA WEINSTEIN: to a musical instrument learning,

MEGAN SUMERACKI: to dancing, and so on.

YANA WEINSTEIN: So let's talk about space practice first. The idea of spaced practice or spacing out your studying over time is basically the opposite of something you might be familiar with, cramming. Think back to the last exam or test that you took. Did you spend a while doing some studying a little bit over time? So maybe half an hour a day for a few weeks? Or did you perhaps spend one day right before the exam, a long, long day of studying and then maybe even studying late into the night? Generally, we find that students tend to prefer that second method, or maybe they don't prefer it, but certainly the one that they default to simply because, well, various reasons. But one of them is that we're all quite deadline-driven. So when that test comes up and it's tomorrow, that's when we sort of get in gear to study.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: It's a lot easier throughout the weeks when the test isn't coming up to say, oh, I don't need to do my half hour today. Oh, I'll do it tomorrow. Well, I'll double up over the weekend. And if you keep doing that over and over again, eventually you end up right before the test not having studied very much and needing to try to cram.

YANA WEINSTEIN: And space practice is the opposite of that. It involves setting aside small chunks of time to practice over a period of at least a few weeks leading up to the exam. Now, the thing about spaced practice is that even if you spend the same amount of time studying that information spaced out as compared to cramming it on that last day, you are likely to remember more of it on the exam. So in reality, you won't be studying more, you'll be studying the same amount of time, but spread out over longer.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: And when you spread out your study episodes over longer periods of time, you learn more in the same amount of time than you would if you crammed. The other benefit of spacing is that the stuff that you're learning actually becomes more durable. You're learning for the long term, not just for the test right now. And a lot of times, we are really mostly worried about the test right now. So if it's the night before an exam, you just want to cram it in, get through the test, and you don't really care if you remember it later. Or maybe that's your future self's problem. But in reality, eventually you're going to need that material again, even if it's just for the next test in that same class or another class that's related in the following year or even just a semester later. I'm sure your teachers or professors are always telling you that you need this stuff as you continue either through schooling or into your careers. And sometimes it's difficult to believe that we will actually need this stuff. But ultimately, even if it's just to get through this one class, this one semester, the information you're learning you need to retain at least through the semester to get through the class. And ideally, you'll be learning things that you can use throughout your life.

YANA WEINSTEIN: Absolutely. The issue with space practice is that it's unfortunately not something you can decide to do at the last minute, by its very nature. This is something that you need to plan out before, well before the exam comes up. What is a good way to do this? Well, we tend to ask our students to take a look at their schedules and see where they can fit in a little bit of studying. Now, you might wonder, how much studying should I do? Does it need to be an hour or two hours, half an hour? Here's what we say to our students. We say, look, if right now you're doing zero minutes of studying every day for this test that's coming up in a few weeks, even if you added five minutes per day, that's still infinitely more than zero. And in all honesty, if you add five minutes to your schedule, you'll likely to perhaps continue a bit longer once you actually get into it. So we recommend setting aside some amount of time that seems reasonable to you. Don't overcommit and say you're going to do two hours of studying a night for a month because that's probably not going to happen. So some realistic amount of time, perhaps half an hour every couple of days or so. And during that time, this is not about doing the homework that you've already been assigned. That's separate. During that time, you're going to be actually studying for the upcoming exam or quiz, not the one that's coming up in a day or so, but the one that's coming up a bit later. This is not something that naturally occurs. So it really is something that you're going to need to get disciplined about and try to actually commit to.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: And the key is to really take out your planners or calendars-- If you have an online calendar, that's fine too, and actually block off the time and say, this is the 30 minutes I'm going to spend studying for history, or this is the 45 minutes that I'm going to spend studying for math. Because when you block off that time, it makes it easier for you to then work it into your schedule. You're less likely to end up accidentally double booking yourself.

YANA WEINSTEIN: Yeah. And so you could do this, try it out for about a week and then look at your calendar and see what you actually did. So take a log of when you actually did study as planned or whether something came up and stopped you from doing it. Or perhaps if you tried to study, but you had planned a study session for midnight and then realized that that's not the best time for you to be studying.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: And if your schedule isn't working for you, make adjustments. it's really useless and honestly kind of depressing and is going to discourage you if you keep blocking off times, and then having to skip all of those times. So it's sort of like going to the gym. If you decide that you're going to go to the gym every morning for an hour before going to school, probably unless you're an athlete, that might not happen. Or if it's something that doesn't happen one week, it can be very discouraging and you feel like, ah, well, I'm just not a person who can go to the gym. Well, that's not necessarily true. You just have to find the time that's best for you. So if you are scheduling your study sessions for very, very early in the morning or very late at night, or at this time in the afternoon when you tend to get really tired and that's not working for you, try something new the next week. The goal is to keep playing with it until you get to a point where you have a schedule that works for you so that you can successfully study for your courses spaced out over time. And in the long-run, it's going to save you time.

YANA WEINSTEIN: So a good way of doing this would be if you have a class, let's say, on a Monday, ideally what you would do is sleep on Monday night because sleep is very important, and then study that information again, say, on Tuesday. It doesn't have to be exactly Tuesday, but the idea is that you're leaving a gap of sleeping in between, which is helping you to consolidate the memories.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: OK, so you've blocked off your time. You've figured out when you're going to study. But what in the world are you actually going to do while you're studying? We haven't gotten to that. We've just been going on and on about scheduling. Well, we said there are two strategies that are really effective, one being spaced practice, the other one is retrieval practice. And the idea behind retrieval practice is to try to bring information to mind, try to produce the information that you've already learned. And you can either write it down or you can say it out loud, or you can teach a friend maybe who's in the class or maybe your dog or your cat or your turtle, really whoever. Just make sure that you're producing this information, bringing it to mind, and then producing it in some way. The important thing is that you put your books and your notes and all of your other course materials away and try to produce these things from memory. You don't want to just keep looking at your notes or looking at your book. You want to produce it on your own.

YANA WEINSTEIN: And of course, one obvious way of doing this might be to take a practice quiz. So if your professor or teacher has given you access to some kind of quizzing materials or some kind of study guide that you can use to quiz yourself, then definitely do that. If you don't have access to anything like that, you can also just literally take a blank piece of paper and try to write down everything you can remember about a particular topic from memory. And then afterwards what you would do to check to make sure that you got things correct or didn't miss things, you would take a look at your textbook and see whether there are some gaps or some inaccuracies. So it's interesting to ask students whether they actually do this. And what we find is that a few students will say that they do practice tests, and maybe you're one of them. But if we then ask students why they do the practice test, they tend to tell us, well, I want to know what I know and what I don't know, and then I can study. I like to think about testing as the opposite of that. I think of taking a test as studying. And then once you've studied by taking the quiz, because that's actually bringing information to mind from memory, then you can check in the textbook to see if you got things right or wrong and give yourself feedback. That's kind of the opposite of how a lot of people think about studying and testing. We think about studying the textbook than checking that we know on a test. I like to think about taking the quiz as the studying, and then looking in the textbook as the check.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: Because the research really does show that bringing the information to mind is helping you learn that information. It's making it easier for you to remember it later, and it's also making it easier for you to apply it in new situations later on. It's producing flexible and durable learning, which is what's going to help you on your upcoming tests and on tests in the future.

YANA WEINSTEIN: One thing to note is that it's going to feel hard to do this. If you're used to reading and rereading your textbook, what happens is that every time you read a particular section for the next time, it starts feeling easier and easier to read it. But with practicing retrieval or bringing information to mind from memory, at first, when you start doing that, it might feel pretty difficult. You might have some gaps in your memory and not be able to recall much. And the important thing here is not to sort of lose confidence and say, oh, this doesn't work for me and go back to reading and rereading. That difficulty that you're experiencing of trying really hard to bring the information to mind and hopefully some of the time succeeding is actually going to create more learning in the long-run, even if it feels more difficult.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: I like to tell my students to think about it this way. Which would you rather have? A situation where you're at home trying to write down information on a blank sheet of paper and struggling. Maybe you're only recalling half of it, maybe not even half, but then you can go back and look at the course material, figure out what you've missed and try again. Would you rather that, have that difficulty at home, or do you want to have that difficulty when you get in to take the test or exam, where you're sitting down and you're trying to answer questions and you're like, shoot, I don't know. I can't bring this information to mind. Struggling, struggling. But at this point, it's too late. There's no way for you to just go back to your course materials and look. That would be cheating, which has a whole other set of problems, right? Where would you rather it be difficult, while you're practicing and it doesn't really count, or at least it doesn't count in the same way, or during that test when it really matters?

Another analogy that works really well is to think about sports or specifically to think about running, distance runners. When I was in high school, I did a lot of distance running. So I'll use that as an example. If you're getting ready for a long race, say you're going to run 5 kilometers or 10 kilometers for some sort of competition, you wouldn't practice only by walking really slowly. Now, you might do some walking, right? That's still good for you. It still gets you moving. Just like when we talk about retrieval practice, you're still doing some rereading and some looking over your material. But really you need to get to a point where you're able to run. Maybe it's not the full distance, maybe it's not everything all at once. You're doing it in spaced out intervals. But you still have to practice running in order to get good for the race. Retrieval practice and learning is the same way. You need to practice bringing the information to mind so that you're really good at bringing the information to mind and applying it later. So think of those practice tests as practice for ultimate exams and really practice demonstrating what you're learning. And then if you struggle, just like you would if you're practicing for a sport of some sort, you can slow down, you can look over the material again. But you need to work your way back up to practicing retrieval, trying to produce what you know.

YANA WEINSTEIN: So just to recap, we've talked about two strategies. The first is space practice, where you're spacing out information or spacing out studying over time, and the second is retrieval practice, which is bringing information to mind from memory. And the way to combine these would be something that we'd call spaced retrieval practice. So imagine you're spacing out your studying throughout a few weeks or a month. And then each time you sit down to study, what you're actually doing is quizzing yourself or trying to recall the information in some other way, like describing it to a friend. Now, you're combining the benefits of spaced practice and retrieval practice.

MEGAN SUMERACKI: And these two strategies work really well together. And if you're going to start with just a couple strategies, which we really recommend starting out slow rather than trying to overhaul everything all at once, you would want to start with these two because they are the most effective comparatively. We also know that just by listening to one podcast, you're not going to have learned everything that there is to know about spacing and retrieval. You may need to revisit this podcast again. Or if you want another format of resources, we have a lot of things on our website-- www.learnings cientists.org. And you can find posters that describe the strategies. You can also check out our blog. And the blog has a lot of information about how to use the strategies. And in the show notes, we'll link to a blog post where we talk about ways that students can use our website most effectively. In two weeks, we'll be coming out with another episode where we talk about the other four strategies that are very effective-- interleaving, elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding. Thanks for listening.

YANA WEINSTEIN: The Learning Scientist Podcast is funded by the Wellcome Trust.