Coordination Funds

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Creating and promoting lasting knowledge is a major goal of education. Schools and other educational institutions are expected to enable learners to acquire knowledge that is preserved for a long time, ideally for a lifetime, which they can use flexibly whenever needed. In psychological and educational sciences, research on knowledge acquisition often aims at identifying characteristics of instruction and learning processes that promote the acquisition of knowledge that remains available and accessible beyond the current learning session over long periods of time and can be used as the basis for further learning. Yet, despite the broad consensus that lasting learning is one of the key issues of the learning sciences, empirical research in psychology and the educational sciences has almost exclusively focused on learning outcomes within relatively short periods of time.Thus, hardly any systematic research—let alone a comprehensive theoretical account—exists that could inform recommendations on how learning and instruction at school should be designed to create lasting knowledge. Considering that laboratory experiments indicating the conditions that enhance short-term retention often differ from conditions that promote long-term learning, this research is desperately needed. The proposed research unit will contribute to closing this knowledge gap. In the research unit, lasting learning is understood as learning that prevents the rapid (exponential) decline of acquired knowledge in memory and that enables students to apply the acquired knowledge. The proposed research is based on a common conceptual framework that combines research on desirable difficulties in learning with the principle of meaningful (generative) learning. In nine projects, the roles of learning settings, learner characteristics, and their interactions in lasting learning are examined. We focus on the effects of three major desirable difficulties in learning (retrieval practice, distributed learning, and interleaved learning) on long-term learning and transfer, combined with instructional interventions that support meaningful (generative) learning. All projects will be based on experimental intervention studies in schools (primary and secondary level), which will draw on learning materials from the subjects of biology, mathematics, German and physics. In addition to psychological expertise, didactic expertise in these subjects will also be considered in the development of the materials. In this way, the research unit is expected to make a significant contribution to the development of a theory of lasting learning in educational contexts.