Learning and Re-learning
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #56
Hello! I hope things are going well for you. Recently, a colleague asked me about memory techniques to remember students’ names, and one thing I mentioned to her is successive relearning.
This involves a combination of the spacing effect and retrieval practice, in that information is retrieved more than once over a period of time.
Benefits
Successive relearning is a cognitive technique that can be tried with any class or learning situation. As well as being helpful when memorising student names, it could in principle be applied when teaching any kind of information or skills.
Spacing out the practice is really critical to this technique. That is to say, it’s not just about repetition:
“One might argue that simply recalling items more times is better for retention regardless of when those correct recalls happen, but evidence indicates otherwise: One-week retention was better when students had recalled items correctly one time in each of three spaced sessions than when they had correctly recalled each item three times during a single session [68% vs. 26%]” - Rawson & Dunlosky (2022).
Combining retrieval and spacing might seem obvious, but this combination remains rather under-explored in the research, according to the researchers quoted above!
Using the technique
A very helpful recommendation to emerge from this research area is to have your students retrieve information three times in quick succession (e.g., within a single lesson), and then three further times at widely spaced intervals.
This might mean building in more opportunities for active retrieval in an initial class or lecture than is typical. For example:
A mini-quiz during a presentation of new information;
Retrieval-based note-taking after presenting the information;
Peer questioning later in the lesson.
Then, further spaced retrieval is planned. A brain dump at the start of the following lesson, perhaps, a formal test further down the line, and so forth.
Some caveats
Hopefully what has been suggested above sounds manageable as a memory-informed approach to classroom teaching. It fits well with what we know about retrieval and spacing.
However, it’s worth pointing out that successive relearning still has quite a limited research base, and one which tends to focus on memory for vocabulary and definitions.
The optimal schedule of later practice is likely to vary depending on the materials/tasks involved. Most things are not as arbitrary as vocabulary (or names), and can be more easily connected to prior knowledge in the form of schemas. If forgetting is slower, as a rule, then you can wait longer before revisiting the material.
Read more in Rawson and Dunlosky’s paper, below.
Rawson & Dunlosky (2022). Successive relearning: An underexplored but potent technique for obtaining and maintaining knowledge. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 31(4), 362–368.
I hope that helped! Back in the summer, I asked what people would like to read about, and memory-based teaching strategies was the most popular response. This is one example, and I have a couple more to share in the coming weeks.
Have a great week,
Jonathan
Last week: How Parents Can Support Study Skills (2)
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