Reading focus
Syllabus: How Does Experience Change Behavior?
Compare claims about immediate performance with evidence from later retention and transfer tests, including how learners judge their own progress.
Why you’re reading it. Develop criteria for evaluating a practice method beyond how successful it feels during training.
A question to consider. The volunteer performs well with frequent prompts. What later test would reveal whether the procedure can be carried out independently?
Why this reading
Instruction can make performance look better without producing equally durable learning. This review brings evidence from motor skills, verbal learning, and judgments of learning together around that problem.
Before you read
Acquisition is the training phase; retention tests what remains later; transfer tests performance under changed demands. Metacognition concerns judgments about one’s own thinking and learning. The authors distinguish relatively lasting learning from performance at a particular moment.
Read for
- Compare examples of learning without immediate improvement with examples of improvement that fails to endure.
- Track how practice spacing, practice variability, and feedback affect training performance and later tests differently.
- Examine why an experience that feels fluent can produce a misleading judgment of mastery, and how later evidence could correct that judgment.
Consider afterwards
- Two practice methods produce different end-of-session scores. Design a later comparison that could reveal which method better supports retention and transfer. What would a fair comparison need to hold constant?
Editorial context
This is an integrative narrative review, not a meta-analysis estimating one effect for every learning task. Its examples support evaluating learning beyond immediate performance. They do not imply that difficulty is always helpful, that feedback should be eliminated, or that any one practice schedule suits every learner and skill.