The Timing and Frequency of Instruction to Foster New Learning: Comparing Cognitive and Motivational Strategies in Category Learning

Effective instruction should not only enhance immediate performance but also prepare learners to succeed when learning independently in novel situations (new learning). This study examined which timing and frequency strategies of instruction most effectively foster new learning. We compared six strategies, inspired by theories of motivation (e.g., self-determination theory) and cognition (e.g., testing effect), with two control conditions (no-instruction and full-instruction). Across three experiments (total N = 1,522), participants performed a category learning task. They first received instruction through feature highlighting, whose timing and frequency varied across conditions. Subsequently, their performance was assessed in an independent session where they learned new categories without instruction. An adaptive strategy that tailored instruction to learner performance significantly outperformed the control conditions in initial experiments (Experiments 1 and 2). However, this effect was not observed in a comprehensive experiment (Experiment 3), suggesting that adaptivity itself may not have been the beneficial factor. Instead, an overall examination suggested that the beneficial effects were attributable to two underlying instructional patterns shared by the conditions that outperformed the control conditions: (1) providing instruction in successive sequences, and (2) interspersing tests without instruction by restricting the frequency of instruction. Instructional strategies with these two patterns yielded a significant advantage over the control conditions for independently discovering correct knowledge in novel situations, although they did not reliably improve generalization of that knowledge to other items. This integration of instructional patterns appears to foster new learning by balancing the useful information from instruction with the desirable difficulty of testing.