Motivation Effects and Efficiency of Retrieval Practice over Lecture
[cover image by joshuaseajw92 on Pixabay]
by Cindy Nebel
Retrieval practice is one of the most robust strategies that we have for durable learning. It’s effective across materials, age groups, and settings. And so long as the transfer isn’t too far, it’s effective for both fact learning and application. Today I’m reviewing a study that pushed retrieval practice to it’s limits (1). If retrieval practice is THIS effective, are we wasting time with lectures? Should we just jump straight to the practice?
The answer to this question is… complicated. And in a very large way depends on your goals as an educator or learner.
In the first study, participants watched a statistics lecture about central tendency, did 20 practice problems on central tendency (with feedback), or both. What the researchers found was that combining lecture and practice did lead to the very best performance, followed numerically but not significantly by practice only and then lecture only. This is great news given that most of us can’t imagine only doing one or the other. How would that work?
But the researchers noted something important. The (rather small) benefit of the combined instruction plus practice came at a cost - time. It took almost twice as much time to make a rather tiny gain over practice only. They also asked students about their preferences and what helped them learn the most. Participants thought they learned more from the conditions that included lecture and that they basically learned nothing from retrieval practice. This could be problematic for student motivation.
In a second study, the researchers assessed participants’ interest in statistics and the particular topic (linear regression) as well as an over-arching question about their self-efficacy in math/statistics (How good are you at math?). Participants were then divided into lecture only and practice only conditions.
Replicating Study 1, there was no significant difference in performance between lecture and practice, but there was a difference in time. Students went through the practice problems much faster. There was also an interesting interaction with student interest in statistics. While the lecture made no real difference, students who were already interested in statistics became more interested with practice whereas those who were not interested became less interested with practice.
These findings were replicated in another study which additionally showed that students with initially lower confidence in math benefitted by being more focused on the material with practice problems, but appreciated it’s value more when they received both the lecture and the problems.
Image by felixioncool on Pixabay
Taken together, what does this tell us?
1) We need to be paying attention to the interaction of learning strategies on motivational factors. Motivation matters both for student participation in course material but also for self-directed learning.
2) Jumping straight to practice is (maybe) ok to do. When I first read this article, I was thinking about how skipping the lecture was like skipping the explicit instruction and jumping straight to an inquiry approach. And in some ways, it is. But practice with feedback also includes important elements of explicit instruction. Participants are being explicitly told the answer after each problem. Still, there are a lot of instructors who probably use something like this as their inquiry approach.
However, I caution educators not to ditch explicit instruction altogether as I’m concerned there may be some interactions here yet to be uncovered. For example, there could be an interaction with cognitive load. Maybe these problems were relatively easy and more complicated material or students with lower prior knowledge wouldn’t show the same effects. And we may unintentionally hurt our lowest performing students.
3) Practice matters. Across all studies, the conditions that included retrieval practice far outperformed lecture only conditions. It is not enough to just lecture. Students need that knowledge reinforced through retrieval practice.
References:
(1) Asher, M. W., Sana, F., Koedinger, K. R., & Carvalho, P. F. (2025). Practice with feedback versus lecture: Consequences for learning, efficiency, and motivation. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.
