Contextual Enrichment and Distribution of Practice in the Classroom

Small scale experiments have led us to believe that teaching a lot in a short time is inefficient, perhaps because it overtaxes student resources. This principle, however, has not been adequately tested in realistic instructional settings. Another untested practical notion derived from psychological theory is that diversifying environmental contexts of teaching and providing contextual aids for the organization of course content can make instruction more effective, particularly when it is massed. These predictions were tested with an 8-hour statistics course, consisting of four videotaped lessons. The lessons were presented either within a single day or over 4 days. Environmental context was either diversified, by teaching the lessons in four different rooms, or was held constant by using a single room setting. Retention was tested 5 days after training in a totally new environment. Field independence of subjects was measured by the Group Embedded Figures test. We found: (1) Distribution of lessons over 4 days was more effective than a single day presentation; (2) diversification of context by using a different room for each of the four lessons resulted in better productive performance for field-dependent students. Diversification was equally effective for time-massed and distributed teaching. We concluded that both massing and context effects were primarily retrieval, rather than learning, phenomena because performance at the end of each lesson was not affected by experimental manipulations while recall after 5 days was. Our results indicate that efficiency of instruction can be increased by diversifying the teaching environment. Such context diversification would be a particularly useful instructional strategy in settings where transportation costs necessitate massed teaching.