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00:00:02

[Carolina]
 

Hello everybody, I'm very excited to be here. It's a global event and if there's anything that I that I love, it's a global event because I would consider myself global myself. I was actually born in Brazil, in Sao Paulo, so if there are people from Brazil here, I'll say hello to you, If you are from Germany, I have then lived in Germany and did all my education in Germany. But my talk will be in English, here we go. I'm going to talk about memory and I'm going to talk why it matters to understand how memory works for education. Here we go.
 

00:01:03
 

I'd like to set expectations for this talk. First of all, what is this talk and what isn't this talk? First of all, I will talk about some research findings about memory and it really is encouraging a reflection on what you already do and then think about what does the science of learning say? It's about this bi-directional dialogue, that's all what it is. It is not about must-follow rules and it is not about a session that has zero overlap with your practise.
 

00:01:43
 

In fact, I expect that what I'm telling you today and what I'm presenting has overlap with things that you already do. The only thing I'm doing is I'm giving you a little bit research of why it works, what you're doing. Also, I don't want to overstretch my promises, so I cannot account for all eventualities in the classroom. Every classroom is different, every student is different, and so you have to make your own tweaks. All right, so let's go. What is cognitive psychology? Cognitive psychology is an area in psychology that looks at how we remember information, how we focus our attention, how we make judgments, how we make decisions and how we, for example, solve problems. In all those fundamental aspects of how our memory and our mind works, if you think about it, those are just building blocks for teaching and learning strategies. I think it's really important to understand that what I'm explaining is we have those different building blocks and it is about finding ways on how we can apply this. Sorry, what I'm going to do, I'm going to talk about space practise and retrieval practise. Those two strategies that come from cognitive psychology and that we know really works very much in all different kinds of contexts. I will talk a little bit about what it is, why it happens, how we investigate it, and then finally, how we apply it. Let's start with space practise.
 

00:03:37
 

What is space practise? The main idea of space practise is that repetition is a good idea. If we repeat something, we will be more likely to remember it in the future. Now, when repeating a lesson or when repeating something, we can do it in immediate succession. So, we study something and then we study it again and then we have a final test. Or, we can take the same study time, but just have a bit of a break between one study for the first time and then restarting it again. Then we can play around with that break in between, so we can make it larger, let's say. The space practise effect is the effect that our memory in the long term will benefit from longer spacing in between one study episode and the next.
 

00:04:30
 

And this dates back to 1885, to Hermann Ebbinghaus, and he discovered that if you have that fixed amount of study time and you distribute it over different study sessions, that that approach is more advantageous for long-term memory than cramming everything into, let's say, a single session. Now, I'm going to give you a couple of examples of how this was investigated. So, in this study here, they had 75 students from Iran, and in the beginning, they all took a pre-test. So, they wanted to assess vocabulary knowledge, used to fill in the blank test, just to make sure that everyone was basically on the same stage. So, there was no differences between the students. And then for 12 weeks, students had one of three different learning conditions. So, in one condition, that was the space practise condition, where students had three 20-minute sessions per week, and they always had 15 words per week that they were studying and learning. So, that was spaced. In the math condition, the time was exactly the same, so it was 60 minutes, but just
one time, right? So, study time for the same number of words was exactly the same. The only difference was it was not distributed across the week. And then we have a control condition where there was no focused vocabulary instruction.
 

00:06:16
 

Two tests were given, one a week later, and another one four weeks later. And if you look at the findings, this is what they found, that in both of those tests, in the more immediate one and in the delayed one, they found that spaced practise outperformed all other conditions. So, just separating and distributing the study time across the week benefited the learners to remember the vocabulary better in the future. Now, sometimes you may want to help your students study. Maybe, you know, they want to study with flashcards. So, that's quite something that is very popular. So, in this one here, they had two scenarios, right? So, if I give you the following scenario, you have to study, you want your students to study 20 vocabulary pairs. So, you have either the choice to take those 20 pairs and divide them up into four smaller stacks of five pairs each or one large stack and have them study the large stack. What I will give you as an option is that each of those stacks, you go through four times.
 

00:07:37
 

So, you take a small one four times, the big one four times and so on, right? What would you tell students which scenario to use, the four smaller flashcard stacks or the large one? So, you can scan this in and it will take you to the survey and you can put in your answer there. There is also the voting link here if you need it. Okay, answers are coming in. I'm going to give you the results. This is what your evaluation of the scenario is. Most of you would go with the four smaller stacks, right? Okay. Well, this study has actually been conducted.
 

00:09:01
 

So, they did a web-based study. They had participants studying 40 synonym pairs for the GRE, that's the entry test for universities in the US. And the manipulation was exactly what I just said. So, the words were either in one large stack of 20 cards or four small stacks of five cards each. In session one, during the learning, they studied the four small stacks four times in a row. So, the first one, the second one and so on, and then the large one. And a day later, they had the final test. What we like to do in cognitive psychology, we like to ask students after they studied something about their judgement of learning. And the judgement of learning asked them, okay, give me a prediction. How well do you think you will do on a test later on on this material, right? Okay. And what I'm going to show you here, first of all, I'm going to show you the actual performance on that test, on that memory test for the words. And if you look at that, you will see that participants and the words that were studied in the large stack were better remembered than the words that were studied in the small stacks, right?
 

00:10:36
 

Sorry, I'm not seeing any slides, but okay, people see it's next. Okay, so, right. So, the one on the left side is a small stacks, and I labelled it as math practise. Why is that the case? Because if you have a small stack of just five cards, and you study it four times, if you study the first concept, you put it in the back, you study four others, you re-encounter that first concept much quicker, right? But if you have 20, then you re-encounter that one only after looking at 19 others. So, the spacing is larger. So, there's more time that passes by, right? But if you ask them whether to make a prediction, they say the other way around.
 

00:11:29
 

They say they feel much more comfortable with the smaller stack than with the larger one, because the smaller stack, that's kind of a security thing, right? But it doesn't introduce as much effort that you would need to actually commit it to memory for a longer lasting effect. In this study here, they looked at space practise, and this was 150 Korean students from six different universities, and they studied 48 low-frequency English words, okay? And they were interested in looking at space practise versus mass practise. These are the dates of the week there. For the mass practise condition, they either studied those
words using fill in the blank or flashcards. They also wanted to find out if one is better than the other. So, they did that, and they studied each of those words five times with either fill in the blank or flashcards.
 

00:12:37
 

For space practise, that was distributed. So, they still studied it five times, but only once every day, right? So, basically, it was just distributed the time. Everything else was exactly the same. So, it was just when they were exposed and re-exposed to the same material. They had an immediate test that was fill in the blank, where they had to produce the L2, so the foreign words, after giving the Korean word. And they had a more complex sentence production test where they were given a word, and then they had to create a sentence that used that word in the context. And they had another test two weeks later, okay? What I'm going to show you is the result for two weeks delayed because, again, in education, I'm personally not interested in the immediate effect. I'm interested in the delayed ones to see what, you know, because for English learning, I want them to have long-term retention of it. And what they found was that whether it was fill in the blank during practise or flashcards didn't really matter much. However, participants who used the spaced practise clearly outperformed participants who had the same study time, but just crammed into one session. So, for L2, language two learning, what we know is that we can find medium to large benefits and effects for English learning, for spaced practise. We specifically find it for delayed tests, which, again, is what we want in English learning.
 

00:14:22
 

We find it for young learners, but also adults. Most studies have been done with adults, actually. And we found it for vocabulary, for grammar, but also for pronunciation learning. So, it's quite versatile in that. So, I couldn't come here as a cognitive psychologist and not talk about the actual cognitive processes underlying this effect. And one thing I want to say is that even though this effect is quite old already, and we have been investigating it for many, many, many years, decades, and so on, it's still not fully understood, yeah? But we have two candidates of processes why this spacing effect occurs. The first one is for getting in reactivation. And that is the idea that forgetting is key for this effect to occur. So, we need some forgetting to occur. And then when we reengage with that material after a spaced period of time, we have to kind of reconstruct and bring it back to memory. And that process seems to be reinforcing and strengthening the memory. So, that's one idea.
 

00:15:37
 

The other one, it's a bit more complex, bear with me, I will explain it to you, is variation of context. So, and this really boils down of what we think our memory works, right? So, the idea is that whenever we study something, let's say specific vocabulary, that material we are studying, that's target information, okay? So, if we study it today and tomorrow and so on, that probably will stay very much the same. But what changes is contextual information. And this is the environment around us, our mood we are in, all the contextual variables around us, yeah? And the idea is that when we learn, our memory trace will have target information in it, but also store context information. And if we space out our learning, those context variables that are stored in our memory will vary slightly.
 

00:16:41
 

Because if time passes by, there will be different contexts of variables around that people store along the target information. And the idea is that in the future, if we need to retrieve that target information, we are more likely to do so if we can sample from our environment and that those contextual variables match with the ones we have stored. And if there's more variability, it's more likely that we find the information in our memory, okay? So, that's why spacing, one idea why spacing is so effective, yeah? Now, to come to a couple of practical tips here, what we want for spacing is really to review all the material. And this can be done formally or informally using a variety of different exercises. It is about re-engaging the student with information that has been previously taught or they have been previously learned. Sometimes you want maybe to help your students to come up with their own schedule of previously taught material, and they might need some support with that. Because it's one thing about setting it up, like, you know, a continuous learning plan, and the other to actually stick with it. Spacing in space practise is something that feels hard.
 

00:18:01
 

So, they need constant encouragement. That's really a key thing. Because you need that kind, that period of forgetting in order to use and really leverage that effect. So, and forgetting is frustrating for all of us, but that's actually what makes that specific effect so beneficial. Now, to put it in Ulrich Neisser's words, you can get a good deal from rehearsal. If it just has the problem of dispersal, you would just be asked to do it en masse. Your remembering would turn out much worse. Now, you might already use quizzes in your teaching. And so, my question to you is, what are quizzes for? What are the goals of quizzes? Why do you use them? Again, you can scan in the QR code and put your answers in there. People are bringing in some answers here. They're coming. Check learning, test knowledge, gamifying, lessons and learning, because it's fun to evaluate. Fun, fun. It's cooler for revising.
 

00:20:00
 

Some people have it for revising there. I don't know what page you're referring to. This is the link again. Okay. Yes. Right. So, we know repetition is good. Repetition is key. We need repetition. But the question now is, how should repetition look like to be most effective? And that brings us to retrieval practise. So, the main idea is, you have the study episode in the beginning, and you have a final assessment in the end. And then the question is, what happens in between? So, you could either restudy. So, you could read it over and over again, look at the material over and over again. And that's a valid study strategy. Or instead of doing that, you take a practise test. And the retrieval practise effect is the benefit of taking a practise test of recording information from memory over just rereading it again, or restudying it again without any memory recall. So, everything that you said in the mentee right now is correct. Retrieval practise can give us feedback. What does the student know?
 

00:21:21
 

What does the student have understood? This can help them to allocate what to study next. It can help you to allocate your teaching. You know, if you see there's still a gap in understanding, you can adequately change it in order to meet that gap. And it's motivating, right? So, many of you said fun and so on. And all of these aspects have this effect on learning performance. So, retrieval practise has this indirect effect through all those mechanisms that you have listed on learning performance. However, retrieval practise in itself, so bringing information to mind in itself, is learning. That in itself is a learning event that has a direct effect on learning performance. And we know this from the real world. We don't even have to look at research yet. We know it from the real world. Because whenever in the world, in our daily lives, we recall information from memory, we are more likely to remember it.
 

00:22:21
 

For example, phone numbers. Probably the only phone number you can remember is your own or some weird phone number from your childhood. And it's because those are the numbers you have repeatedly recalled from memory over and over again. All the others, you don't even look at them anymore. Maybe you read them out, but you never recall them again. The other example is Google Maps. Great to have, but you could end up putting in how to get from A to B, and A to B being the same kind of two locations repeatedly. Because if you never do it from memory, it's really difficult for you to navigate a city without a navigation system. Because what do we do? Again, think about what I explained about how our memory works with cues.
 

00:23:13
 

So, if you navigate a city without Google Maps, you will pay attention to, oh, that's the tree there, and that's the shop there. And I have to turn right here. So, you do that. And that's the same here as well. We use that recall for it. And music lyrics is the other one. Now, to show you what it means. So, in this study here, participants either re-read material four times. So, repeated reading. Or they read it once, and then they were asked to write everything they know and understood down on a piece of paper, right? They were again asked if there were any questions they would have. Sorry, not questions. They were asked whether they
had any predictions how well they would do on a future test. So, if you just look at the predicted learning first. For the predicted learning, it looked like this.
 

00:24:13
 

So, participants were very sure that they would remember much more after reading something for four times compared to reading it once and then writing down what they know. But the actual amount of learning, so on the actual test, it's the other way around. So, students who had the opportunity to just recall from memory once, outperformed the ones who had not had that experience, right? So, our own judgement of learning is sometimes very flawed because it is biassed towards easiness and effortfulness, not being effortful. And whenever it is effort and effortful, we feel that's not working. But exactly that kind of effort is what learning is, right? I tell my students all the time, learning is difficult, it's challenging. And if it feels challenging, you're doing it right. That's where it should be, right?
 

00:25:27
 

And this one, just this one here, because that's also a quite interesting one because I know that some teachers for language learning, they use imitation as a strategy. And a study looked specifically to compare retrieval practise with imitation. So, in this one, they had undergraduate students that studied Hebrew words. And in the imitation condition, they were shown the picture of the noun and the sound file was played at the same time. And then they had to repeat the sound, repeat the word. So, that's the imitation condition. In the retrieval practise condition, they saw the picture, there was a pause, they were asked to attempt pronunciation of the word, and then the sound file was played, right? So, first attempt, recall, attempt to pronounce, and then they got the file. That was the only difference between those two. They had to test immediately after training or two days later.
 

00:26:33
 

What did they find? On the comprehension test, where they were given pictures and they had to find the correct picture for the word, for the immediate test, there was no difference between retrieval practise and imitation. However, for the delayed test, retrieval practise outperformed imitation. They had a second test because, again, for English pronunciation, it's really important. So, that was a production test where they saw the picture and had to say the word out loud. And for this one, on both the immediate and the delayed test, they found an advantage of retrieval practise compared to imitation. And I have to say, that's something that's quite, it could be quite easy to implement, right? There's not much that has to be changed for it in order to implement something like this. The nice thing about space practise and retrieval practise is that you can nicely combine those two.
 

00:27:36
 

So, in this one here, Japanese pharmaceutical students at the University in Japan, they attended a 12-week course of conversational English. And they wanted to find out in this study whether, what's better, cumulative or non-cumulative weekly quizzes. And I'm going to explain what it is. So, this is what the setup looked like. So, every week, starting from week two to week nine, the students had weekly quizzes after they have been introduced some vocabulary. And the weekly quizzes were either cumulative, which means that they always introduced vocabulary not only from that specific week, but also previous week.
 

00:28:32
 

And the non-cumulative quizzes, they only introduced or tested vocabulary from that specific week. So, for the cumulative ones, there was always the spaced retrieval happening, because the quiz always had material that was a bit older. And they wanted to find out what would be better on a test later on. The first thing that's interesting to look at is what does the performance look like during practise? So, during all those weekly quizzes. And when you look at that, is that across the board, the non-cumulative quizzes, so the ones that just contain the vocabulary from that specific week, throughout, they perform better than the others. Because obviously, if you have material in there that's much older, they're more forgetting, and people will not perform as well. So, that's not so surprising. However, what happens on a final test three weeks later? And on that one, it turns around again.
 

00:29:47
 

So, we see that the cumulative tests, quizzes, weekly quizzes, outperformed the non-cumulative ones. So, there was less forgetting for those students who have been learning, using weekly quizzes that had outperformed the non-cumulative ones. So there was less forgetting for those students who have been learning, um, using weekly quizzes that had all the material in them. Again, thinking about why it occurs, um, so one mechanism is reactivation of memory traces, so there is some forgetting, and you have to reactivate it, you have to recall it, and that recall leads to strengthen memory representations, and also possibly creates different. Retrieval routes to the same information that helps us. Um, to be more flexible about recalling that information. It all boils down to that. The conditions, really, that boost your performance during practice are not necessarily the same that increase them in the long term, right? So, quick gains that you can get during practice do not often translate into long-lasting gains. So it is about that effort that has to be put in.
 

00:30:53
 

Finally, I'm going to finish with some tips for this one. Um, ritual practice can be implemented in a variety of different ways, everywhere, informally, with different quizzes, with different activities, and so on. Uh, providing feedback can, in addition, enhance that effect. Uh, ritual practice can be used for complex materials as well. It depends on really what you ask your learners to recall or reconstruct in their memory. Sometimes it needs scaffolding for learners, so they need cues, right? Again, remember, that's how our memory works. It works with cues. Have you ever experienced you go into one room wanted to pick up something you go get to the room, you don't remember it anymore, and then you go back where you actually errone it the first time, and then you remember it again? It's our memory. We need the… we needed the cue in order to find the information we wanted. Um, make and retriever practice a regular activity, and that also reduces the anxiety.
 

00:31:55
 

Now, Aristotle already knew this all, um, and he stated, exercise it repeatedly, recording a thing strengthens. The memory. I'm going to wrap up with a final activity for you. This one here, uh, it's just a WE activity, um, it's your pledge. Um, what are your takeaways from this? Um, what are things you would like to try out in your teaching? What are things that you've maybe found interesting, and so on. So again, you can use the same link as before, um… to… I'm going to put it here again for you, for ease. Um… To put in your answers there. So, coming in here, just giving time for people to write there. And sentences.
 

00:33:13
 

What I really love about, um, doing those seminars for teachers is they're always engaged. It's so nice! I'm a teacher myself, so when I go somewhere, I also always try to engage whenever. Um, so it's quite nice. You can continue that, you can leave it open, I'm just going to wrap up with my last slide here. Um… Right. So, um, if you want to know more about the science of learning, um… I've co-written a book on it, um, that specific book, as a test is specifically for students. Um, there's another one that's called Understanding How We Learn. That's more for teachers. It's both from the same group of people. The learning scientist, um, you can check out our materials, blog posts, podcasts, posters, and books, um, and so on. And, um, right, um, that's me. Um, thank you so much, um, for coming here and, um, for engaging in your questions and so on.
 

00:34:13
 

[Will]
 

Thank you, Carolina, very, very much. What a talk, everybody, huh? What? What an amazing key she's given us today. What I'm trying to sort now, I can't see anything. There we go. Right, I had the wrong thing on. Great. Oh, thank you, Carolina again. Just really, really eye-opening, I think. Um, just exactly why we had to get you on here to deliver that talk, because it was just so eye-opening, and something that I think deserved to be shared. I'm sure you've shared it in other places as well, but we wanted to play our part in helping you share that.
 

[Carolina]
 

Yes. No, no worries, thank you so much. Yeah. So, thank you. Um, so we… We've got a question, um… I'm going to try to… because I've been trying to process the question. And I'm going to try, I'm just going to read it to you, and hopefully you'll be able to, um, shed some light, because I'm struggling to sort of get around it myself. For the mastery of complex vocational content. How does incorporating active retrieval practice. A form of rehearsal within a spaced schedule. enhance the retention interval and improve the transfer-appropriate processing of learned skills to novel, real-world professional scenarios.
 

00:35:25
 

[Carolina]
 

Okay, yeah, that's a good question. So, I think… Transfer is inherently difficult for humans, right? Um, so transfer from one. Um, scenario to another one is incredibly difficult. Um… So, I think, um, that one is… It can be done through retrieval practice and space practice, so we have studies that show that it helps, it can help transfer. Um, particularly if you include exercises that basically change some surface level aspect, so that students have to re-approach it again. So that helps. Um, the other thing that helps, that is another strategy that I haven't talked about today is interleaving. Where you have basically different kinds of examples that are often, um… confounded with it, or confused with each other, um, and if you, um, learn them side by side, and and contrast and compare. Um, that is actually really helpful for students as well to see where the differences and similarities are. The performance during practice, if you do that contrast-compare, will be lower than, for example, blocking the same kind of practice over and over. But in the long term. They may, um, they will be… more likely to transfer it to new and novel examples.
 

00:36:47
 

[Will]
 

Okay. Right, and you encourage that in the English language classroom, to be doing that.
 

[Carolina]
 

Yeah, yeah, exactly, so that's… so we know that it works, for example, we have studies that looked at it in arts. Um, for different kind of painting styles, so we have seen some benefits there. But it is true that transfer is something that is really difficult, and it requires a lot of iterations to happen.
 

[Will]
 

Okay, right. Well, thank you very much, Carolina. I think we're gonna let you go. You've got a bit of a longer break now, uh, to have some dinner and a bit of a sort of… you've had such a big day. But we'll see you again later for your third session in a little while. Thanks again, Carolina.
 

[Carolina]
 

Okay, thank you so much.