All Good Things Must Come to an End: A Potential Boundary Condition on the Potency of Successive Relearning

Successive relearning involves practicing to-be-learned content until a designated level of mastery is achieved in each of multiple practice sessions. As compared with practicing the content to the same criterion in a single session, successive relearning has been shown to dramatically boost students' retention of simple verbal materials. Does the documented potency of successive relearning extend to the learning of mathematical procedures? Across three experiments, 431 college students read instructions about how to solve four types of probability problems and were then presented with isomorphic practice problems until they correctly solved three problems of each type. In the "successive relearning" group, students engaged in practice until one problem of each type was correctly solved in each of three different practice sessions. In the "single-session" group, students engaged in practice until three problems of each type were correctly solved in a single practice session. Both groups completed a final test involving novel problems 1 week after the end of practice. When an effect size was estimated across all experiments, final test performance showed a significant but only small advantage of successive relearning over single-session learning (pooled d = 0.28, 95% CI = 0.08, 0.49). Secondary analyses revealed that correctly solving a problem did not significantly boost the likelihood of subsequent success, which also could explain the relatively low level of test performance for both groups. These outcomes identify a potential boundary condition for the benefits of using successive relearning to enhance student achievement when learning mathematical procedures.