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The evidence behind the series
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Browse the scientific research and professional literature used across all seven volumes of The Science of Learning for Educators.
7book volumes
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2 references
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- Vol 1 RE: Chapters 1, 3, 7, 9, App A
- Vol 2 RE: Chapter 3, App C
- Vol 2 TE: App B
- Vol 4 RE: Chapters 1, 2, 4, 7, 20
- Vol 4 TE: App C
- Vol 7 PE: App D
practice testingdistributed practiceinterleaved practiceelaborative interrogationself-explanationretrieval practicelearning technique efficacyJournal article Evidence summaryAt a glance
Dunlosky and colleagues review ten commonly used learning techniques and rate their utility across learner characteristics, materials, tasks, retention intervals, and educational contexts. Practice testing and distributed practice receive high-utility ratings because their benefits are comparatively robust and broadly applicable.
Key ideas
Elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, and interleaved practice receive moderate ratings: they are promising but depend more on prior knowledge, material, implementation, or a still-limited evidence base. Summarisation, highlighting, keyword mnemonics, imagery for text, and rereading receive low ratings as general-purpose techniques, though each may help under particular conditions or with training. The ratings reflect evidence and generalisability, not a claim that low-rated methods never work. The review emphasises durable retention and comprehension, notes substantial gaps in representative classrooms, and distinguishes familiarity during study from later learning.
Why it matters
For practice, students need explicit instruction and routines for spaced retrieval, feedback, explanatory thinking, and discriminating among problem types rather than relying mainly on passive review.
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- Vol 1 RE: Chapters 1, 5, 8, App A
forgetting curvesavings methodnonsense syllablesdistributed practicerepetition effectsmemory retentionquantitative memory researchBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
In this foundational experimental study, Ebbinghaus investigates memory with lists of nonsense syllables constructed to reduce the influence of existing meaning and association. Serving as his own participant across extensive trials, he standardises presentation and mastery, then measures retention by the time or repetitions saved when relearning material after intervals.
Key ideas
He reports the characteristic pattern of steep initial forgetting followed by a progressively slower decline, alongside effects of repetition, list length, and the distribution of practice. Repeated learning strengthens later savings, and distributing repetitions can yield more durable results than concentrating them in one sitting. These results helped make higher mental processes accessible to quantitative experiment. The findings should not be treated as a precise universal decay schedule: the design used one participant, artificial verbal material, and a specific savings measure.
Why it matters
The broader educational implication is that memory depends on time and practice conditions, and that planned revisiting and retrieval are needed if learning is expected to endure.
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Evidence summaries explain the central idea and why the source matters to educators.
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Edition abbreviations
- TE
- Teacher Edition
- PE
- Practice Edition
- RE
- Research Edition
Citation checks
References are checked against publisher records, scholarly indexes, DOI or ISBN metadata, repositories and author records where available. An entry marked [Citation not verified] preserves the wording found in the relevant volume without attributing findings to an unconfirmed work.
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