Katherine A Rawson

Katherine A Rawson
Kent State University | KSU · Department of Psychology

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153
Publications
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10,836
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Publications

Publications (153)
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Unlabelled: Multiple-choice practice tests are beneficial for learning, and students encounter multiple-choice questions regularly. How do students regulate their use of multiple-choice practice testing? And, how effective is students' use of multiple-choice practice testing? In the current experiments, undergraduate participants practiced German-...
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Retrieval practice is beneficial for both easy-to-learn and difficult-to-learn materials, but scant research has examined students’ use of self-testing for items of varying difficulty. In two experiments, we investigated whether students differentially regulate their use of self-testing for easy and difficult items and assessed the effectiveness of...
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Objective: Little research has addressed the treatment of lexical–semantic comprehension deficits (i.e., difficulty retrieving the meanings of words) in people with aphasia (PWA). Research suggests that practice retrieving names for depicted objects from long-term memory (production-based retrieval practice) more strongly benefits word retrieval fo...
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Successive relearning involves practicing a task until it is performed correctly and then practicing it again until it is performed correctly during other spaced practice sessions. Despite its widespread use outside of education, few students use this approach to obtain and maintain knowledge in formal educational settings. We review evidence that...
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Declarative concepts are abstract concepts denoted by key terms and short definitions that can be applied in a variety of scenarios (e.g., positive reinforcement in psychology; Rawson et al., 2015). One common learning goal for declarative concepts is to instill knowledge that students can use to support the application of content in novel scenario...
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Textbooks currently include many elaborations that describe, illustrate, and explain main ideas, increasing the length of these textbook chapters. The current study investigated if the cost in additional reading time that these elaborations impose is outweighed by benefits to memory for main ideas. Given that elaborations in textbooks sometimes fai...
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Almost anything worth doing takes effort, so it is no surprise that effort has played such a central role in how researchers, theoreticians, instructors, and even students think about student learning and achievement. In this special issue, the authors of the target articles explore the importance of effort to students’ self-regulated learning with...
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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...
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Undergraduate students with ADHD may benefit from retrieval practice but may have difficulty using this strategy consistently. We examined whether undergraduates with ADHD benefit as much as non-ADHD students from self-regulated retrieval practice and retrieval practice to criterion. Students with ADHD (n = 58) and without (n = 121) learned key ter...
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Successive relearning combines two effective learning techniques (retrieval practice and spaced practice) and involves practicing retrieval until some level of mastery has been reached (i.e., at least one correct retrieval attempt) in each of multiple sessions. Several laboratory studies have demonstrated the promise of successive relearning for en...
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This study examined how the distribution and amount of practice affect word retrieval in aphasia as well as how such factors relate to the efficiency of learning. The central hypothesis was that factors that enhance the learning of new knowledge also enhance persistent access to existing, but inconsistently available, word representations. The stud...
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It is uncontroversial in psychological research that different schedules of practice, which govern the distribution of practice over time, can promote radically different outcomes in terms of gains in performance and durability of learning. In contrast, in speech–language treatment research, there is a critical need for well-controlled studies exam...
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Many students use laptops to take notes in classes, but does using them impact later test performance? In a high-profile investigation comparing note-taking writing on paper versus typing on a laptop keyboard, Mueller and Oppenheimer (Psychological Science, 25, 1159–1168, 2014) concluded that taking notes by longhand is superior. We conducted a dir...
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Retrieval practice and spacing are two factors shown to enhance learning in basic psychological research. The present study investigated the clinical applicability of these factors to naming treatment in aphasia. Prior studies have shown that naming treatment that provides retrieval practice (i.e., practice retrieving names for objects from semanti...
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Why are testing effects on memory stronger when practice tests involve free recall versus recognition? Three experiments tested the hypothesis that relational processing is evoked to a greater extent during free recall practice than during recognition practice. Students studied a list of words from taxonomic categories and then either restudied the...
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Interleaved practice involves studying exemplars from different categories in a non-systematic, pseudorandom order under the constraint that no two exemplars from the same category are presented consecutively. Interleaved practice of materials has been shown to enhance test performance compared to blocked practice in which exemplars from the same c...
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Textbook passages commonly include elaborations (details supporting main ideas) with the assumption that elaborations will improve learning of the main ideas. However, elaborations increase text length, which subsequently increases the reading time of that text. These observations lead to the two focal questions of interest in the current study: Wh...
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Students rely on their notes to memorise and learn critical course content, and recent studies of note-taking state that most students take notes, citing a survey published in 1974. Over the past four decades, classrooms and note-taking technologies have evolved: students can take notes on electronic devices, and some classes are entirely online. D...
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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Cambridge Core - Cognition - The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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In The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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This study investigated the efficacy of the Fluency Development Lesson (FDL) in improving reading achievement in primary grade struggling readers. 30 readers, enrolled in a summer reading clinic, participated in daily 40-min mini-reading lessons across 5 weeks. During the fluency lessons, readers practiced and developed their literacy skills throug...
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Declarative concepts (abstract concepts denoted by key terms and definitions) are foundational content in many courses at most grade levels. The current research compared the relative effectiveness of provided examples to faded examples (a technique involving a transition from studying provided examples to completing partial examples to generating...
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Complex span and content-embedded tasks are two kinds of tasks that are designed to measure maintenance and processing in the working memory system. However, a key functional difference between these task types is that complex span tasks require the maintenance of information that is not relevant to the processing task, whereas content-embedded tas...
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General Audience Summary This research evaluated whether practice testing is better than restudy for facilitating deductive reasoning, a process that involves reasoning from several facts to reach a conclusion. Specifically, we investigated whether practice testing enhances memory for facts necessary to complete a deductive reasoning task. Learners...
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General Audience Summary In order for students to do well on their course exams, they need to use effective study techniques. One such technique—testing oneself—has been consistently shown to enhance retention of to-be-learned material more than if one were to simply study that material. Recently, research has shown that the benefits of testing one...
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Students in many courses are commonly expected to learn declarative concepts, which are abstract concepts denoted by key terms with short definitions that can be applied to a variety of scenarios as reported by Rawson et al. (Educational Psychology Review 27:483–504, 2015). Given that declarative concepts are common and foundational in many courses...
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Research on techniques for enhancing long-term retention has focused almost exclusively on single-session learning conditions. However, even the most potent initial learning manipulations typically do not yield retention levels sufficient for successful performance in many real-world contexts. In contrast, successive relearning (i.e., practicing to...
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Although memory retrieval often enhances subsequent memory, Peterson and Mulligan (2013) reported conditions under which retrieval produces poorer subsequent recall—the negative testing effect. The item-specific–relational account proposes that the effect occurs when retrieval disrupts interitem organizational processing relative to the restudy con...
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Acquisition of principle-based concepts involves learning how and when to apply a specific principle to different instances of the same problem type. Within this domain, learning is best achieved when practice involves studying worked examples followed by problem solving. When given the choice to use worked examples versus problem solving, how do p...
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When study is spaced across sessions (versus massed within a single session), final performance is greater after spacing. This spacing effect may have multiple causes, and according to the mediator hypothesis, part of the effect can be explained by the use of mediator-based strategies. This hypothesis proposes that when study is spaced across sessi...
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Students are expected to learn key-term definitions across many different grade levels and academic disciplines. Thus, investigating ways to promote understanding of key-term definitions is of critical importance for applied purposes. A recent survey showed that learners report engaging in collaborative practice testing when learning key-term defin...
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Arnold and McDermott [(2013). Test-potentiated learning: Distinguishing between direct and indirect effects of testing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39, 940–945] isolated the indirect effects of testing and concluded that encoding is enhanced to a greater extent following more versus fewer practice tests, ref...
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Students are commonly asked to learn declarative concepts in many courses. One strategy students report using involves generating concrete examples of abstract concepts. If students have difficulties evaluating the quality of their generated examples, then instructors will need to provide students with appropriate scaffolds or feedback to improve j...
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Purpose The purpose of this article was to examine how different types of learning experiences affect naming impairment in aphasia. Methods In 4 people with aphasia with naming impairment, we compared the benefits of naming treatment that emphasized retrieval practice (practice retrieving target names from long-term memory) with errorless learning...
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Declarative concepts (i.e., key terms and corresponding definitions for abstract concepts) represent foundational knowledge that students learn in many content domains. Thus, investigating techniques to enhance concept learning is of critical importance. Various theoretical accounts support the expectation that example generation will serve this pu...
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The study behaviours of students can be assessed from several perspectives, such as what study strategies are used, the total number of hours of study, and the distribution of studying over time. Here, we present the results of a survey study that considered each of these perspectives by asking students to report the what, how much, and when of the...
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Retrieval practice improves memory for many kinds of materials, and numerous factors moderate the benefits of retrieval practice, including the amount of successful retrieval practice (referred to as the learning criterion). In general, the benefits of retrieval practice are greater with more than with less successful retrieval practice; however, l...
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College students must regulate much of their learning and hence it is important to discover whether they use effective study techniques, such as testing with feedback. We conducted three experiments to evaluate the degree to which college students use testing with feedback as they are learning key concept definitions. The three main issues of inter...
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The positive effect of delayed retrieval practice on subsequent test performance is robust; by contrast, making delayed judgments of learning (JOLs) encourages covert retrieval but has a minor influence on final test performance. In three experiments, we experimentally established and explored this memory-metamemory paradox. After initial study of...
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The target articles in the special issue address a timely and important question concerning whether practice tests enhance learning of complex materials. The consensus conclusion from these articles is that the testing effect does not obtain for complex materials. In this commentary, I discuss why this conclusion is not warranted either by the outc...
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Recent research on testing effects (i.e., practice tests are more effective than restudy for enhancing subsequent memory) has focused on explaining when and why testing enhances memory. Of particular interest for present purposes, Zaromb and Roediger (2010) reported evidence that testing effects in part reflect enhanced relational processing, which...
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Several techniques have been identified that can help students of all ages and abilities learn, understand, and retain materials across a wide variety of classes. Although these techniques are not the panacea for all the learning hurdles that students must overcome, they do offer an easy and low-cost solution to boosting student achievement in many...
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Taking tests on to-be-learned material is one of the most powerful learning strategies available to students. We examined the magnitude and mechanisms of the testing effect in college students with (n = 25) and without (n = 75) attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder by comparing the effect of practice testing versus a comparable amount of restudy...
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Recent research has explored the effects of collaborative testing, showing costs and benefits during learning and for subsequent memory. However, no prior research is informative about whether and how students use collaborative testing in real-world contexts. Accordingly, the primary purpose of the current research was to explore the extent to whic...
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Objective Health literacy is increasingly recognised as a potentially important patient characteristic related to patient education efforts. We evaluated whether health literacy would predict gains in knowledge after completion of patient education in cardiac rehabilitation. Method This was a re-post observational analysis study design based on Su...
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Because individuals with acquired language disorders are frequently unable to reliably access the names of common everyday objects (i.e., naming impairment), rehabilitation efforts often focus on improving naming. The present study compared 2 rehabilitation strategies for naming impairment, reflecting contradictory prescriptions derived from differ...
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Despite the voluminous literatures on testing effects and lag effects, surprisingly few studies have examined whether testing and lag effects interact, and no prior research has directly investigated why this might be the case. To this end, in the present research we evaluated the elaborative retrieval hypothesis (ERH) as a possible explanation for...
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Retrieving information from memory enhances learning. We propose a 2-stage framework to explain the benefits of retrieval. Stage 1 takes place as one attempts to retrieve an answer, which activates knowledge related to the retrieval cue. Stage 2 begins when the answer becomes available, at which point appropriate connections are strengthened and in...
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A wealth of research has established that retrieval practice promotes subsequent memory, particularly when the retrieval attempt is successful. Furthermore, the number of successful retrievals during practice (i.e., criterion level) dramatically influences final test performance. For example, Vaughn and Rawson (2011) had participants learn Lithuani...
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The current research evaluated the extent to which the grain size of recall practice for lengthy text material affects recall during practice and subsequent memory. The grain size hypothesis states that a smaller vs. larger grain size will increase retrieval success during practice that in turn will enhance subsequent memory for lengthy text materi...
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Declarative concepts (i.e., key terms with short definitions of the abstract concepts denoted by those terms) are a common kind of information that students are expected to learn in many domains. A common pedagogical approach for supporting learning of declarative concepts involves presenting students with concrete examples that illustrate how the...
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Testing effects have been well-established across a variety of studies involving school-age children. Specifically, children's test performance improves when they are given the opportunity to practice retrieval prior to the final test as compared to when practice involves only study. The current investigation focused on the influence of testing wit...
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Research on metacognitive judgment accuracy during retrieval practice has increased in recent years. However, prior work had not systematically evaluated item-level judgment accuracy and the underlying bases of judgment accuracy in a criterion-learning paradigm (in which items are practiced until correctly recalled during encoding). Understanding t...
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Research has consistently shown memory is enhanced when learning combines test trials with study trials compared with study trials alone (i.e., testing effect). However, the majority of work on testing effects has involved undergraduate students. In the current experiment, the authors examined testing effects in 2 groups of elementary school childr...
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Practice tests and spaced study are both highly potent for enhancing learning and memory. Combining these two methods under the conditions in which they are most effective (i.e., practice tests that invoke successful retrieval from long-term memory and spacing study across days) yields a promising learning technique referred to as successive relear...
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In Rickard, Lau, and Pashler's (2008) investigation of the lag effect on memory-based automaticity, response times were faster and proportion of trials retrieved was higher at the end of practice for short lag items than for long lag items. However, during testing after a delay, response times were slower and proportion of trials retrieved was lowe...
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Some study techniques accelerate learning, whereas others are just a waste of time—but which ones are which? An unprecedented review maps out the best pathways to knowledge