ABSTRACT
The aim of this book is to take research from the laboratory to the classroom. This is an important goal because, despite decades of research by cognitive psychologists, there is not a strong tradition of translational educational research, where findings are clarified in controlled laboratory settings and slowly introduced to real-world classrooms (Roediger, 2013). Several books written for non-specialists, such as Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Brown et al., 2014) and Why Don’t Students Like School? (Willingham, 2009), highlight some main points about educationally relevant research. Of course, we hope that books like the one you are holding will also help to spread the word about how findings from cognitive psychology can be used to improve education. In this chapter we take a close look at two strategies—retrieval practice and spaced learning—that most cognitive psychologists agree are some of the strongest candidates in terms of having a significant impact on education.
