The Benefits of Using the SIR Techniques

without even trying and sometimes without even knowing they recalled it. What is interesting is that the better you know something, the less effort your brain uses (Haith & Krakauer, 2018).

Desirable difficulties are a key feature in explaining how the SIR techniques facilitate application and transfer. Bjork and Bjork (2020) note, “Conditions of learning that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer, whereas conditions that create challenges (i.e., difficulties) and slow the rate of apparent learning often optimize long-term retention and transfer” (p. 477). Additionally, psychology scholars Mark A. McDaniel, Ruthann C. Thomas, Pooja K. Agarwal, Kathleen B. McDermott, and Henry L. Roediger III (2013) find that introducing desirable difficulties improves student performance on application questions; when used with feedback, they “can promote learning that is deeper than just retaining a particular answer” (p. 368).

Despite the challenges of implementing the SIR techniques, it’s well worth the effort for both teachers and students. Now that you understand the difficulties involved, let’s take a closer look at the benefits you and your students can expect to receive from incorporating spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval in the classroom.

Quiz Yourself

When an expert and a novice are performing the same task, which one’s brain uses the most energy? a. Expert b. Novice

The Benefits of Using the SIR Techniques

When some people learn about the SIR techniques, they may hear the word repetition and immediately think of old-school drills. This is not the case. For example, interleaving requires doing the opposite—not doing the same skill back to back repetitively. In addition to helping students retain information for long periods of time and producing application and transfer skills, the SIR techniques offer several key benefits. In the following sections, we’ll discuss how the techniques enhance automaticity, higher-order thinking, and other learning improvements.

Automaticity

A group of scientists (Haier et al., 1992) at the University of California, Irvine, recruited volunteers to play the video game Tetris (Nintendo, 1989)—in which the player encounters a series of different shapes and tries to pack them together without any gaps—hoping to find out if the brain works less when the subjects know more. The scientists scanned the subjects’ brains as they played Tetris for the first time. Then they sent them home for four to eight weeks of practice with the game. After the practice interval, scientists scanned the subjects’ brains again as they played the game. By the time of the second scan, the subjects had naturally become quite good. Richard J. Haier and colleagues (1992) include an image of the side-by-side brain scans (https://bit.ly/3P7Puoa) showing how the subject’s brain exerted more energy when it was unfamiliar with the game and less energy once the subject had become a more expert player.

What does this mean for students? As students build automaticity (that is, effortless recall of information), their brains work less to remember foundational knowledge and skills, freeing them to devote their neurological resources to other learning and activities (such as application and transfer). While the previous study on Tetris is highly regarded and frequently cited, more recent studies by researcher Hyunkyu Lee and colleagues (2012), as well as scholars Diana J. Gorbet and Lauren E. Sergio (2018), produced similar results.

It is important to note, though, that simply reinforcing knowledge or information does not directly translate to increases in application and transfer skills. Cognitive scientist Pooja K. Agarwal (2019) finds that students must intentionally work with application and transfer to build those skills. Therefore, teachers should support students in first building a solid foundation of knowledge before expanding to questions dealing with application and transfer. Teachers should not expect students to apply and transfer knowledge during an assessment if they have not previously tried applying and transferring that knowledge.

As students build automaticity, their brains work less to remember foundational knowledge and skills.

Higher-Order Thinking

Created by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom in 1956, Bloom’s taxonomy has served educators for many decades as a guide for classifying learning outcomes and objectives. Teachers use the taxonomy for creating assignments, increasing a lesson’s rigor, designing assessments, planning project-based learning, and more (Armstrong, 2010). Although the taxonomy has been updated through the years, most recently in 2001 by education researchers Lorin W.

Anderson and David R. Krathwohl, the overall framework has essentially remained the same. The updated taxonomy is often illustrated as a pyramid with remember at the base and create at the apex (https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/ blooms-taxonomy). Students start with the remember stage and move up the pyramid—through understand, apply, analyze, and evaluate—hopefully ending with the ability to create. However, without a firm foundation in remembering

Without a firm and understanding, students are unable to evaluate or create. foundation in By using the SIR techniques, students build a strong foundaremembering and tion of knowledge and are better able to recall information. In understanding, doing so, they are able to apply and transfer that information in the upper level of Bloom’s taxonomy.students are unable to evaluate Another foundational tool educators use is Norman Webb’s (2002) Depth of Knowledge (DOK). Developed by senior research or create. scientist Norman Webb in 1997, DOK helps educators assess how to create a rigorous environment where all students can learn at a high level (Aungst, 2014). DOK classifies an activity or task into four levels according to the complexity of thinking required, as shown in figure 1.1. Though this book focuses primarily on remembering and recalling, the benefits of the SIR techniques are not limited to the bottom level of Bloom’s taxonomy or level 1 of Webb’s DOK. Applying the techniques is beneficial not only for building knowledge but also for building transfer skills, an essential goal of education.

Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 4

Skill or Concept

Recall Strategic Thinking Extended Thinking

Figure 1.1: Webb’s Depth of Knowledge.

As students adopt the SIR techniques, they will move up on Bloom’s taxonomy and Webb’s DOK; not only will students know the information, but they will also be able to apply and transfer it to new situations.

While you do not see the words apply or transfer in the four levels, in Webb’s (2002) foundational description of DOK, the ability to apply is found across all four levels. For example, in mathematics, applying a formula is regarded as level 1. At level 4 in reading, students must take information and apply it to a new task. At level 4 in science, students must transfer existing knowledge to solve new problem situations. Therefore, the ability to retain, apply, and transfer learning is evident in both Bloom’s taxonomy and Webb’s DOK.

Unfortunately, sometimes educators do not put enough emphasis on building knowledge in their rush to get to application and transfer. As psychologist Robert Sternberg says, “One cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply” (as cited in Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014, p. 12).

Think back to the Tetris study; by engaging in the game frequently between test 1 and test 2, participants laid a foundation for recall. By having that recall, and achieving automaticity, their brains didn’t have to work as hard and could instead operate on higher-level tasks. Teachers see the same thing happening in the classroom: the better students know something, the less energy their brains use to access that information, freeing up energy to use elsewhere. For a real-life example, think about asking a group of kindergartners for the answer to 2 + 3 and then asking a group of high school seniors the same question. Which group needs to exert the most mental effort to solve the problem? The high school seniors would answer the question with much less effort than the kindergartners. The high school seniors’ brains have more resources to obtain the result of 2 + 3 in an application or a transfer task. This same idea applies to teacher-assigned tasks that utilize the various levels of Bloom’s taxonomy as well as Webb’s DOK.

Physiologically, if students are struggling with remembering, it is almost impossible for them to apply and transfer that information. Therefore, if teachers use the SIR techniques to build knowledge or increase recall, they support students’ ability to reach the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy or Webb’s DOK.

Additional Benefits

Scientists have studied the SIR techniques for many years. Though the techniques are not new, they are nontraditional. In addition to automaticity and higher-order thinking, research shows additional benefits of using the SIR techniques. The techniques have been shown to: