YeckehZaare Iman, Resnick Paul
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Research, Honor Education, San Francisco, MA, USA.
NPJ Sci Learn. 2025 Jun 5;10(1):35. doi: 10.1038/s41539-025-00322-5.
Spacing and retrieval practice enhance learning, but students often underuse these strategies. We tested a simple grading incentive, which we call Counting Days, in two RCTs: one randomizing 143 students within a course and another randomizing 71 instructors. The "counting questions" control condition awarded points for each practice question answered, while the "counting days" treatment assignment awarded points for each day that a student answered a set of questions. In the within-class experiment, the counting days group earned higher exam scores, mediated by spacing practice over more days. Spacing was especially beneficial for lower-GPA students: the correlation between course exam scores and GPA in prior courses was significantly lower for the counting days group. In the between-instructor experiment, there was no way to compare learning outcomes between instructors, but both the number of days and a number of questions practiced were significantly higher under the counting days condition.
间隔练习和检索练习有助于提高学习效果，但学生们常常没有充分利用这些策略。我们在两项随机对照试验中测试了一种简单的评分激励措施，我们称之为“计算天数”：一项试验在一门课程中对143名学生进行随机分组，另一项试验对71名教师进行随机分组。“计算问题”控制组为每个回答的练习问题计分，而“计算天数”处理组为学生回答一组问题的每一天计分。在课堂内实验中，“计算天数”组的考试成绩更高，这是通过在更多天内进行间隔练习来实现的。间隔练习对平均绩点较低的学生尤其有益：“计算天数”组的课程考试成绩与之前课程的平均绩点之间的相关性显著更低。在教师间实验中，无法比较教师之间的学习成果，但在“计算天数”条件下，练习的天数和问题数量都显著更多。
