Students develop preferred approaches to studying when preparing for exams. However, many techniques they rely on are likely to be less effective (e.g., cramming, rereading) than techniques that research has identified as more durable and effective (e.g., spaced practice, retrieval practice).
The question is how students can be taught and convinced to use more effective strategies. A recent study by Maurer and Cabay (1) has investigated this question using an in-class intervention and a mix of different methods. They assessed time spent on specific strategies or when students started to study for an exam as well as identified main hurdles for students to use more effective strategies. For the intervention, they demonstrated and taught students about spaced retrieval practice – they call it successive relearning in the paper.
The demonstration required students to engage in successive relearning for three sessions plus a reflection session on the application of the strategy in the classroom. Students were asked to repeatedly recall specific course content from memory in a spaced manner.
As mentioned, the authors used a mixed-method approach. One the one hand, they asked students during the pre- and post-assessment to indicate how many minutes they had spent using successive relearning or other learning strategies, when they had started studying for the exam, their confidence in recalling specific content from the course, etc. On the other hand, they had a few open questions allowing to better understand students’ motivation for using or not using taught learning strategies:
