Skills, Beliefs & Behaviors

Cognitive: Caveats

Retrieval Practice

Retrieval can result in increased anxiety for students. To decrease the negative effects on increased testing instructors should:

    • Explain to students why there is an emphasis in testing in your course and emphasize that you are using retrieval as a learning strategy not an assessment tool.
    • Make retrieval practice low-stakes.

Students might easily fall back to reviewing rather than recalling information. When using other forms of retrieval that are not quizzing (end-of-class summaries for example) remind students that you want them to recall or practice without looking at their notes. If quizzes are implemented online, set a time limit on the quiz to encourage students to engage in actual retrieval.

For retrieval practice to be effective, a small amount of time needs to be allocated periodically (each week) for its implementation. Instructors might feel that 10 minutes every week, for example, takes away too much time from other instruction or practice.

Spacing and interleaved practice:

Students might feel initially frustrated that everything they have learned can be tested in quizzes and exams. Provide students with practice for cumulatively testing such as opening each class session with a test question from a previous section that is connected to the material to be covered. As with retrieval practice, it is important to explain to students the reasons for your classroom practices, particularly if they deviate from what students are used to.

Not all blocked practice (the opposite of interleaved practice), is necessarily bad. Studying first in a blocked fashion might be necessary to become familiar with a new skill or material. The argument is not to eliminate blocked practice but instead to use interleaving when returning to material that has been previously learned.


Self-explanations:

Students may have a hard time generating self-explanations spontaneously. Effective learners generate more self-explanations spontaneously than ineffective learners (M. Chi et al., 1989). This finding is independent on prior domain knowledge (M. T. H. Chi & VanLehn, 1991). Furthermore, the quality of their explanations is also different: effective learner’s explanations tend to be more principle-based and answer when or under what conditions a given concept or skill applies. To facilitate the type of self-questioning that leads students to extract principles and connect concepts. instructors can: 1) provide instruction on how to self-explain and 2) use self-explanation prompts.

Which type of self-explanation is most appropriate to use will vary depending on students’ prior knowledge and environment. Novice students might need more guidance on how to self-explain and might benefit more from direct self-explanation types (Chiu & Chi, 2014). Comparison between various forms of self-explanation prompts in multimedia environments show greater learning gains for direct self-explanation prompts (Wylie & Chi, 2014). It is unclear if this is due to the nature of multimedia environments, which typically places a high cognitive load on learners (multiple resources that require integration and reflection). Asking learners, who might be already cognitively tasked, to self-explain with an open-ended prompt might be counterproductive.

Self-explanations should not be applied to simple procedural domains for which rules and patterns cannot be deduced (Wylie & Chi, 2014).

Worked examples:

Worked examples can lead students to memorize solutions, without deepening understanding. This can potentially happen when only one worked example is provided or when multiple but similar worked examples are used. To avoid this, make sure to use multiple worked examples that exhibit the application of a concept but have distinct surface features (cover stories used to present a problem) to direct attention to the crucial aspects of a problem. A variation of this principle is to examine two contrasting solutions to a given problem and compare them (Rittle-Johnson, Star, & Durkin, 2009).

Students might read worked examples superficially without extracting underlying principles. This can result if worked examples are used without self-explanations (see Self-explanation section). Another strategy to get students to more carefully pay attention to worked examples is to interleave worked examples with problems to solve. Having problems to solve in between worked examples may motivate students to pay closer attention to the solutions (Pashler, 2007)

Principles for how to fade effectively beyond mathematics have not been established yet. Almost all of the research on how to fade support for worked examples, has been done within math (Renkl, 2014).