Practice Made Perfect: Effectiveness of Retrieval Practice, Distributed Practice, and Interleaved Practice for Mathematics Education in Authentic School Classrooms

It is commonly said that practice makes perfect. But as Renkl (2021) rightly pointed out, quoting the legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi, only perfect practice makes perfect. In the present dissertation, I investigated the effectiveness of three promising strategies for such “perfect practice” (viz., retrieval, distributed, and interleaved practice) for mathematics education in authentic school classrooms. Findings of three multi-classroom experiments and a three-level meta-analysis imply that the three practice strategies are effective, but that practice is “perfect” only if students’ initial mastery level is sufficiently high and if, through the set-up of the practice phase and its alignment with the learning goal and the posttest, the right cognitive processes are elicited during practice. This knowledge contributes to the successful implementation of the three practice strategies in authentic school classrooms as well as theoretical and methodological advancements in the field of desirable difficulties research. As such, I hope that the present dissertation can be considered as a step toward practice made perfect.

The research reported in this dissertation was funded by Dutch educational publisher ThiemeMeulenhoff (contract number: TMC20190412-002). Researcher independence with respect to all aspects of the research from design through publication was contractually guaranteed.