How to combine generative learning and retrieval practice in fostering the acquisition of declarative concepts?

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The learning of declarative concepts, i.e. the learning of key terms and short definitions of abstract concepts, is a common learning objective – in almost every domain declarative concepts represent a substantial part of the basic knowledge on which learners build as they expand their knowledge. In view of this common, central and cross-domain learning objective, the design of learning tasks that can foster the acquisition of declarative concepts has received much attention in educational psychological research. A main result of this research is that two types of learning tasks are particularly suitable for this purpose: learning tasks that predominantly encourage learners to construct knowledge (i.e., generative learning tasks) and learning tasks that predominantly encourage learners to practice retrieval. A prototypical generative learning task consists of asking learners, after reading an expository text in which to-be-learned declarative concepts have been presented, to illustrate the declarative concepts using self- generated examples (elaboration) and to establish connections between the concepts (organization). If the learners, as is often the case, still have access to the learning material during this learning task (i.e., the expository text is still available to them), they are predominantly occupied with knowledge construction (elaboration and organization) and hardly with practicing the retrieval of concepts from memory (retrieval practice). A prototypical retrieval practice task, on the other hand, is that learners are asked to reproduce the key terms and definitions of the concepts from memory. If the learners no longer have access to the learning material (i.e., the expository text is no longer available), they are mainly occupied with retrieval practice and, due to the reproductive character of the learning task, hardly with knowledge construction. Both types of learning task can promote the acquisition of declarative concepts. However, to date there has been little research on how the two types of learning task can be combined and how the potential of knowledge construction and retrieval practice in the acquisition of declarative concepts can thus be jointly exploited. From a theoretical perspective, it is highly promising to implement both types of learning tasks, as they should complement each other functionally: Generative learning tasks should predominantly improve the structure of the learners’ mental representations, while retrieval practice tasks should predominantly contribute to the consolidation of the mental representations. Against this background, the aim of the project is to investigate in three experiments how generative and retrieval practice tasks can be combined in fostering the acquisition of declarative concepts.