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This Full-Length Research Paper investigates the difficulty imposed by spaced retrieval practice in nine introductory Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses. By improving student performance in these courses, evidence-based pedagogical practices have the potential to increase graduation and success in STEM fields. Spaced retrieval practice is a technique in which questions on the same topic are asked repeatedly over time with intermittent delays. Spacing may initially make retrieval more difficult because it requires learners to recall information from long-term as opposed to short-term memory. However, this difficulty may ultimately be “desirable” because spacing often produces memory benefits in the long-term. The current paper examines the difficulty imposed by spaced retrieval in the nine STEM courses, using data collected from a 3-year project funded by the National Science Foundation. Results indicated that the magnitude of the difficulty imposed by spacing varied widely across the diverse STEM barrier courses. We anticipate that we will find similarly wide variability in the effectiveness of spaced retrieval practice in students' final learning outcomes, which will be investigated in future work.
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This content will become publicly available on July 28, 2026
Optimizing Learning Efficiency: Balancing Spacing and Repetition Under Time Constraints
Spaced retrieval practice has been repeatedly demonstrated to improve learning, but its implementation is often constrained by real-world time limitations. This study investigated whether, under fixed study durations, learners should prioritize spacing or repetition. Across two experiments (total N = 1589), participants practiced Indonesian vocabulary under four conditions that varied in spacing and repetition. Item difficulty was also manipulated. Results showed that increasing repetitions at the cost of spacing enhanced immediate test performance, particularly for harder items. These findings suggest that spaced retrieval practice is effective only when learners have sufficient prior repetitions to retrieve information successfully. This study highlights the trade-offs between spacing and repetition under time constraints and offers practice insights for optimizing learning strategies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2238567
- PAR ID:
- 10620812
- Editor(s):
- Barner, D; Bramley, NR; Ruggeri, A; Walker, CM
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society; eScholarship Open Access Publications from the University of California
- Date Published:
- Volume:
- 47
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2960-2967
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- spacing retrieval practice optimization repeated practice vocabulary learning
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- https://escholarship.org/uc/item/61p4p686
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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