Syntes: Ramgopal et al. (2026) — in a real course, spaced quizzing beat restudy on the quizzed questions three weeks later, but did not help on related new questions

Källa: Ramgopal, V., Fastrich, G. M., Higham, P. A., Modirrousta-Galian, A., Pattni, M., Potts, R. & Seabrooke, T. (2026). Examining the benefits of spaced retrieval practice on transfer and the student experience in the classroom. Memory 34(10), 1300–1320. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2026.2733327

Verified content

• [full text] 230 first-year undergraduates in an "Introduction to Psychology" module (2023–2024); three spaced learning practice sessions a week for 10 weeks; within each session half the items were multiple-choice questions answered with corrective feedback (retrieval), half were the same kind of questions shown with the correct answer highlighted (restudy).
• [full text] Final multiple-choice test four weeks after the last lecture (three weeks after the last practice session). Repeated questions: retrieval 80.15% vs restudy 70.07%, t(229) = 8.85, p < .001, dz = 0.58.
• [full text] Related questions (same answer options, different correct answer): retrieval 62.42% vs restudy 62.32%, p = .94, dz = 0.01, BF10 = 0.074; overall, related items were no better than new items (all about 62%; BF10 = 0.02). Exploratory analyses with purer measures of transfer found evidence of both positive and negative transfer (not preregistered).
• [full text] Students rated mastery, motivation and attention higher, and anxiety lower (from the second session on), after retrieval than after restudy sessions (e.g. mastery F(1, 224) = 63.43, p < .001; very small generalised effect sizes, η²G = 0.01–0.03).

Limits

• [full text] Students could use their notes during practice and the final tests (they were encouraged not to); attrition and revision between sessions were not controlled (authors' limitations).
• [assessment] Multiple-choice practice with feedback; final test also multiple-choice. Both conditions were spaced, so it is not a test of spacing itself.

Why it is in the library

A large, preregistered, semester-long classroom replication of the retrieval-over-restudy advantage on a test weeks later, with feedback, as C0 requires; and a clean null for transfer to related questions, which marks where the benefit stops.

Added 2026-10-25 by the project (weekly source sweep, kind: new; read: full text). [abstract] = from the published abstract; [full text] = read in the full text; [assessment] = the project's own assessment.