The more time you’ve spent in Learning and the Brain world, the more you’ve heard about retrieval practice.
- If students practice by looking back over work they have done, we call that “simple review.”
- “Simple review” doesn’t benefit learning very much, if at all.
- If students practice by trying to recall information and concepts, we call that “retrieval practice.”
- Compared to “simple review,” “retrieval practice” enhances learning A LOT.
So: rather than reviewing their notes or rereading the textbook, students should ask themselves and each other questions. The additional mental struggle of trying to answer those questions will — in the long run — help them learn the material.
This basic idea has been around for decades, and has gotten lots of research love in the last 20 years. If you’d like to brush up on previous research, you can:
- Check out lots of posts on this blog,
- Look through Dr. Pooja Agarwal’s excellent website, and/or
- Read Agarwal and Bain’s excellent book Powerful Teaching.
Of course, researchers constantly explore new questions within this well-established field. One perfectly reasonable question sounds like this:
“Okay, we know that retrieval practice helps students recall facts and concepts. But does it help them APPLY those facts and concepts? We want students to USE information, not just HAVE information.”
Good point!
A recent study by Corral and Carpenter explores this question across three experiments, and offers a few striking conclusions.
The Setup
Corral and Carpenter ran three experiments with several hundred college students. These students studied slides that defined terminology relevant for a research methodology course: e.g., “reverse causation.”
After looking at the slides:
- Some students simply reviewed the information; they looked at the slides again.
- Some took a short-answer quiz about it (that’s retrieval practice).
- Some studied the quiz questions and answers, but didn’t have to answer them. (A different kind of review.)
- And some did none of those things; that is, they saw the information only once.
As a final step, students took a test. Some test questions checked to see if they recalled the information. Students could get these answers right if they simply memorized the slides. Crucially, other test questions checked to see if they could apply the information in a novel situation. For these questions, simple memorization wouldn’t get the job done — students had to transfer their knowledge to a new situation.
For instance:
- A RECALL question about reverse causation:
- “When it is unclear whether variable X causes variable Y or whether variable Y causes variable X, what kind of causal inference problem do we have?”
- An APPLICATION question about reverse causation:
- Lisa just received her master’s for her work in astronomy. Lisa found that planets that are closer to their moons rotate faster than planets that are farther away from their moons. However, Lisa is not sure how to interpret her data because it is unclear whether a planet that rotates faster draws its moons in closer to the planet or whether moons that are closer to a planet cause the planet to rotate faster. Ignoring the possibility that other factors may be involved, what kind of problem does Lisa have?
Headline Number One: A Big Nuthin’
In the short term, the review strategy didn’t matter.
That is: when there was only an eight minute gap between the review and the final test, then (on average) none of the review strategies helped students score better than their peers who didn’t review. Not retrieval practice; not quiz review; not slide study. Nothing.
And, by the way, they found this same result for both the recall questions and the application questions.
This finding reminds us of an important truth: we’re looking for a study strategy that helps students learn more over the long term. Of course, EIGHT MINUTES isn’t the long term. You can be in and out of Starbucks in under eight minutes. Heck, you can probably read this blog post in under eight minutes.
I’m emphasizing this point because it answers an essential question: “if retrieval practice is so great, why didn’t teachers and students figure it out on our own? If it’s obviously better than review, why didn’t we stumble across this strategy centuries ago?”
We didn’t figure it out because its benefits take a while to appear. Retrieval practice doesn’t help right away. It helps long-term learning.
Headline Number Two: More Reps + More Time = Better Application
Corral and Carpenter repeated their experiment twice: this time with two important changes.
- First: students used their review strategy — either “simple review” or “retrieval practice” or “quiz review” — THREE TIMES, not just once.
- Second: they waited a week to take that final test. (You have already noticed: one week is a lot more time than eight minutes.)
Sure enough, once a meaningful amount of time had passed, students who took three retrieval practice quizes scored higher on the recall questions. AND, they scored higher on the application questions.
In other words: repeated retrieval practice helps students recall facts and definitions. But, it doesn’t only do that. It also helps students transfer that knowledge and apply it in new ways.
This finding merits attention because it pushes back against one of the most common concerns about retrieval practice: “it’s just for memorizing disconnected facts! It doesn’t help students use their learning!”
Well, if Corral and Carpenter are correct, retrieval practice does help students use their learning. Of course, retrieval practice might not help right away — after 8 minutes. But repeated retrieval practice does help students over the long run.
Teaching Implications
First, in language proposed by Agarwal and Bain:
- Rather than ask students to put information back into their brains (that’s “simple review”),
- Ask them to try to take information out of their brains (that’s retrieval practice).
Second: the exact form of retrieval practice isn’t terribly important. According to an ENORMOUS meta-analysis I describe here,
- Multiple choice and short-answer questions work just fine. (Contrary to popular advice, “brain dumps” are less effective.)
- Combining retrieval practice with correct-answer feedback is good, but retrieval practice helps even without feedback.
- Graded or ungraded: doesn’t matter. (Me: I prefer ungraded.)
- Repeated retrieval practice helps students learn and transfer more than one-time retrieval practice. (No doubt there’s a limit here, but I suspect most students benefit from “more than they are currently doing.”)
Third: don’t be misled by the critics. Repeated retrieval practice helps remember facts, ideas, and procedures; and it helps students use those facts, ideas, and procedures.
This research offers real encouragement: when we build repeated retrieval practice into our teaching, we’re equipping students with knowledge they can actually use.
Corral, D., & Carpenter, S. K. (2025). Effects of retrieval practice on retention and application of complex educational concepts. Learning and Instruction, 100, 102219.
