The Critical Importance Of Retrieval For Learning Analysis

The article I have chosen is titled, “The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning,” with the study conducted and written by, Jeffrey D. Karpicke and Henry L. Roediger III. It has been said that learning is considered complete if a student can provide the correct answer to a question. The basic idea of the experiment was to have students learn foreign vocabulary words through the process of repeated study-test trials. The goals of their conducted study were one, to examine the long-standing assumptions tied to the results of repeated studying and testing and their effects on learning. Second was to examine their test students’ assessments of their own learning. And the final purpose of their experiment was to address the issue in learning …show more content…
In their study, students were given forty foreign vocabulary words during a “study period.” Once the period was over, the students were put through a testing period to see what they had learned. After this, the study repeats itself going between a study period and a testing period. In the experiment the researchers had the standard condition, which is consistently going through the studying period and testing period studying the same forty words, and then they added three dropout learning conditions as well. One condition is once an item is recalled correctly it was either dropped from the studying periods but still used in the testing period, a second condition is it was dropped from the testing period but still used during the studying period, and a third condition is it is dropped from both the testing and studying periods. After the researches were done with the students they asked students from each of the conditioning groups how many of the forty words they would remember when they came back to take the final test …show more content…
Shortly after they were dismissed, then returned one week later to take the final test. A couple of key facts to remember were the effects that the four learning conditions had on the rate of which the foreign vocabulary words were learned, the predictions the student’s gave regarding their future performance, and the “long-termed retention” after waiting a week to take the final test. The article provides figure 1 which shows the cumulative proportion of the pairs of vocab words recalled during the learning phase, which also counts the first time a student recalled a word pair. On average, according to the chart in figure 1, the students from each of the four condition groups predicted they would remember around 50% of the vocabulary words, so there were no specific differences between the four conditions. Now Figure 2, which shows the proportion recalled on the final test exactly one week after the learning phase, shows that the results of the test are inconsistent across the board. The results revealed that testing and not studying is an important factor in developing long-term recall. Now in the conditions that required repetitive recall practice, so the standard condition