Abstract:

The problem:
If you don’t use it, you lose it. For example, if a person doesn't exercise his or her physical body, they will likely lose strength, stamina and endurance. And this adage applies to cognitive skills as well. If a person doesn’t regularly rehearse what he or she has learned, they will likely forget important information and have difficulty performing previously mastered skills. Lengthy breaks from school can therefore significantly slow down a student’s learning trajectory. In fact, by a conservative estimate, students in kindergarten through high school lose one month of grade-level equivalent skills relative to national norms over summer break. And the problem doesn’t stop there; this loss of learning extends to higher education. At the university level, a lengthy break between closely related mathematics courses significantly lowers performance in the subsequent course. Since higher education institutions have lengthy winter and summer academic breaks, the problem is how to stem the loss of learning for students who have busy lives and do not wish to spend a significant amount of time during their time off from school studying and preparing for the upcoming semester.

The solution:
Learning loss is most pronounced for mathematics which requires a strong foundation of prior knowledge and skill retention. The Keep in School Shape (KiSS) intervention is a mobile, engaging, innovative and cost-effective program that was designed for the purpose of helping students stay fresh on pre-requisite mathematics skills and concepts during academic breaks. Theoretically, the KiSS program draws on the well-documented benefits of retrieval practice, namely that recalling previously learned material is an effective way of maintaining cognitive abilities. The KiSS program provides opportunities for retrieval practice to students by sending them a daily multiple-choice review activity via text messaging or email over academic breaks. The review problems are chosen specifically to be skills that are requisite for success in a course following the break from school. After judging their confidence in being able to solve a given problem and responding with an answer choice, students have many options as they navigate the daily review activity. These include getting a hint and retrying the problem, viewing a step-by-step solution, and trying a related – but more challenging – problem. In order to simultaneously promote a growth mindset, the KiSS Program provides empowering feedback messages that encourage students to persevere when they are wrong and challenge themselves when they are correct.

The results:
We will discuss how the KiSS Program functions, including the decisions that shaped the design of the most recent version. We will also present results from hundreds of students who participated in the KiSS Program during Winter Break 2022 at a large southwestern university. In particular, we will use data analysis and visualization techniques to share what we have learned about participation, confidence, accuracy, and student feedback. We will conclude with a discussion of how such a program can be constructed to meet the specific goals of instructors who wish to engage their students in regularly reviewing what they have learned over academic breaks so that students return to their studies prepared and ready to make forward progress.

Keywords:

Retrieval practice, mathematics education, growth mindset, review.