Reading an article by Andrew Watson about the spacing effect in student study habits got me thinking about my own psychology classes and the degree to which I hope students leverage such a simple key to better learning, versus the degree to which I force them to use it. As Watson writes, “students have primary responsibility for retrieval practice, whereas teachers have primary responsibility for spacing.” That’s at least how I intend my class to operate, and I schedule student work accordingly:
Those reading quizzes are open note and open book because I want to further leverage just-in-time learning and I want to do it in as low-stakes of an environment as possible. Reading quizzes are “just” formative assessments: measuring what students know and are able to do so far. Further, repeating topics on the reading quizzes, forcing students to circle back around to an earlier topic is my attempt to leverage interleaving.