Karpicke, J. , & Roediger, H. L. (2008) Karpicke, J., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966-968.

Distinctions ‘Study’ or ‘encoding’: the student reviews the form and meaning of the word together, is not required to remember anything on his/her own. ‘Testing’ or ‘retrieval’: the student is required to understand or produce the item in his/her own in response to a cue. The question is what is the contribution of these to retention (long-term learning, memory) of vocabulary.

Four conditions: 1. Standard: all words studied, then tested; presented again and tested again; presented again and tested again (all the words every time) 2. Dropout condition 1: Once an item had been successfully produced in a test, it was dropped from study, but still included in tests 3. Dropout condition 2: Once an item had been successfully produced in a test, it was not tested again, but included in study 4. Dropout condition 3: once an item had been successfully produced in a test, it was dropped completely.

Results show that… Just studying on its own does not improve retention. Need the ‘test’ (retrieval) activities.

Conclusions Just being exposed to form and meaning again and again doesn’t help much. The student needs to make an effort to recall / recognize in order to learn. If they successfully retrieve items in a ‘test’, this doesn’t mean you should stop reviewing them!

But note that… This doesn’t necessarily mean a formal ‘test’ with a grade: what the authors call ‘testing’ includes all review activities that have the student retrieving knowledge of the vocabulary from memory. Note also that it implies successful retrieval: if the student can’t do the retrieval task, they won’t learn from it.

Barcroft, J.(2007). Effects of opportunities for word retrieval during second language vocabulary learning. Language Learning, 57 (1), 35-56.

Concepts retrieval (accessing from stored information) prior retrieval (you’ve accessed this fact before, so the next time you do it it’s easier) testing effect

‘Research has revealed that taking a test can facilitate subsequent test performance even more than additional exposure to the target material.’ (provided that it’s the same material being tested) The more difficult it was to retrieve, the better the improvement in learning (link to deep processing and higher order thinking skills)

Does retrieval work for new words the same way as for known words? Turkish study: Students had cards: one side English + Turkish translation; other side, Turkish translation only. Group 1 studied only word + Turkish translation. Group 2 looked at Turkish, turned over only when they weren’t sure what the English was. Group 2 learned better.

Present study 44 English speakers learning Spanish: 24 nouns, represented by pictures. They were taught them. Then two ways of reviewing: 1. The students saw the words together with the pictures again. 2. The students saw the picture, were given a few seconds to try to recall the word, then the word was displayed. The second condition resulted in better learning.

Barcroft’s suggestion When teaching new words through pictures, ask students to try to come up with the words on their own before teaching them. ???

Conclusion Given that the students have previously been taught the words… … the best kind of review involves learners making some effort to retrieve the new items on their own. But this should be success-oriented. Which means ….

Success-orientation The students can manage to retrieve most of the items on their own. If that doesn’t work, then… The teacher gives hints or help to support their retrieval If that doesn’t work, then … The teacher immediately reveals the target items.