Adaptive Practice Quizzing in a University Lecture: A Pre-Registered Field Experiment

Providing quiz questions has emerged as a powerful means to support learning. However, it is still unclear whether adaptive practice quizzing will enhance beneficial effects in authentic contexts. To address this question, university students (N = 188; n = 155 female) were randomly assigned to employ either adaptive practice quizzing, non-adaptive practice quizzing, or note-taking following three consecutive sessions of a standard psychology university lecture for undergraduate pre-service teachers. In the adaptive practice quizzing condition, quiz questions were adapted to learners’ expertise via cognitive demand ratings, whereas in the non-adaptive condition quiz questions followed a fixed sequence. Students in the adaptive practice quizzing condition outperformed those in the non-adaptive condition after a two-week delay, but not after a one-week delay. Exploratory mediation analyses show that performance on the quiz questions during the learning phase seems to be partly responsible for this effect.