Retrieval practice and the maintenance of knowledge.

A critical aspect of the maintenance of knowledge is maintaining access to that knowledge in memory. The key to maintaining such access is to use that information: The act retrieving an item from memory facilitates subsequent retrieval access to that item. The most efficient scheduling of such "retrieval practice" is in terms of an expanding sequence, as shown by Landauer and Bjork (1978). As a mnemonic technique, expanding retrieva1 practice has a number of practical advantages, and the non-semantic nature of that technique has implications re the nature of storage in and retrieval from human memory. RETRIEVAL PRACTICE AND THE MAINTENANCE OF KNOWLEDGE 2 Recently, a research psychologist for the United States Army told me that the Army is increasingly concerned with the "retention and maintenance of critical skills and knowledge. " It is one thing to carry out training until some performance criterion is reached; it is another to structure training and post-training experience to insure that performance is maintained over time. The real problem, of course, is keeping. information retrievable. Knowledge, once successfully integrated into long-term memory, tends to remain there, but as time goes on and/or contexts change, we are frequently unable to access some knowledge that was readily accessible to us at some earlier point. When that knowledge is necessary to solve some real-world problem, it is often not recallable, though a recognition or cuing procedure would usually reveal that the "missing" information exists in memory (e.g., Bahrick, Bahrick, & Wittlinger, 1975; Wagenaar, 1986). RETRIEVAL AS A MEMORY MODIFIER One key to maintaining access to knowledge in memory is to use--that is, retrieve--that information periodically. In contrast to other memory systems, such as a tape recorder or the memory in a computer, where retrieving stored information does not alter the state of that information in memory, human memory is altered in significant ways by an act of retrieval: The retrieved information becomes more retrievable in the future than it would have been without such an act of retrieval, and certain related items of information in memory may become less retrievable (e.g., Bjork, 1975; Roediger & Neely, 1982). It is not my goal here to discuss the empirical or theoretical deta1ls of such effects. Rather, I want to focus on retrieval practice as a mnemonic technique. Basic Results. Assume a situation where one is presented with an initial opportunity to store some information in memory. That information might be relatively simple, like a name, number, or foreign vocabulary item--or more complex, like a chapter in a book. Assume further that at some later point (Tl), one attempts to retrieve that information. That attempt might be successful or unsuccessful, but assume there is no external feedback as to whether what one recalled, if anything, was correct or incorrect. Now assume that at some still later point (T2) there is a second/test of our ability to recall that same information. To the extent that performance on the second test exceeds performance in the case where there was no first test, we can say that the first test was valuable as a learning (memory enhancing) event. The empirical facts of importance for present purposes are the following. (a) In general, without considering whether the effort to retrieve at Tl was successful or not, performance at T2 profits substantially from the existence of a first test. Under some circumstances such positive effects of a first test on a second test, unconditional on the outcome of the first test, can exceed the positive effects (on performance at time T2) of a second study opportunity presented at time Tl. (c) Failure to retrieve the item correctly at Tl, however, does not help recall at T2. The probability of successful recall at T2 given a failure to recall at Tl is typically very close to zero. A Retrieval-Practice Interpretation. Given that an initial act of retrieval facilitates a later effort to retrieve, it remains to specify the mechanisms through which that facilitation takes place. The idea I want to push here is that an initial retrieval aids a later retrieval to the extent RETRIEVAL PRACTICE AND THE MAINTENANCE OF KNOWLEDGE 3 that it constitutes practice for that later retrieval--that is, to the extent that the processes involved in the initial retrieval overlap the processes required to retrieve that item later. Retrieval of information from long-term memory is a complex, highly fallible aspect of human memory. As such \it is a kind of skill, and like other skills, can profit greatly from practice. A central assumption of the retrieval-practice idea is that an act of retrieval does not simply strengthen an item's representation in memory, but, rather, enhances some aspect of the retrieval process per se. Among the considerations supporting that assumption are the following. (a) If an initial retrieval simply strengthened an item's representation in memory, one might expect that an initial test of recall might facilitate a later test of recognition as much as it does a later test of recall. Typically, however, the effects of an initial recall test on a later recognition test are far less than on a later recall. (b) If, on the other hand, one makes a later recognition test more difficult in ways that might be viewed as making that recognition test more recall-like, then the positive effects of an initial recall test are much larger (Gelfand, Bjork, & Kovacs, 1983). (c) Similarly, as Whitten and Leonard (1980) have shown, as one makes an initial test of recognition more difficult, and recall-like, by increasing the alternatives on an initial forced-choice test, performance on that test decreases but later recall increases. The effects of delaying a first test on performance on a second test also support the retrieval practice interpretation. As we delay the first test, P(Tl), the probability of successful recall at the time of the first test, decreases. Because failure to recall at Tl does not help performance at T2 (i.e., P(T2 given not Tl) equals zero), we might expect that the positive effects of a test at Tl on performance at T2 (given a fixed interval from Tl to T2) would decrease. In fact, real data often show a strong increase in performance at T2 as Tl is delayed from essentially zero to some moderate interval, even though performance at Tl shows a strong drop over that range. The implication of such delay-of-test effects can be seen most clearly in terms of elementary probability theory. The probability of correct recall at T2, P(T2), can be partitioned into P(T2) = P(T2 given Tl) P(Tl) + P(T2 given not Tl) P(not Tl),