PRACTICE EFFECTS ON SKILL ACQUISITION, LEARNING OUTCOME, RETENTION, AND SENSITIVITY TO RELEARNING

This paper presents the results from two experiments that examined pra ctice effects on skill acquisition, learning outcome, retention, and s ensitivity to relearning. In Experiment 1, our learning criterion task was an intelligent tutoring system teaching flight engineering knowle dge and skills. The system was divided into two main curriculum sectio ns, with two practice conditions per section: abbreviated and extended . Thus there were a total of four practice conditions differing only i n the number of practice problems requiring solution across problem se ts. Experiment 1 showed that subjects in the more abbreviated conditio ns completed the curriculum significantly faster than did subjects in more extended conditions, but at the expense of greater errors and lat encies during problem solution within the tutor. Despite these acquisi tion differences, groups performed the same across all learning outcom e measures. Experiment 2 examined the effects of practice condition on retention and sensitivity to relearning after two years. Although the sample size was fairly small (34 returning subjects), we found eviden ce for practice effects on long-term retention but not in the predicte d direction. In terms of our sensitivity to relearning measure, the gr oups did not differ. Implications of these findings for optimizing tra ining are discussed.