Exploring a Novel Training Paradigm for Knowledge and Skills Acquisition

Due to the importance of training, many scientists have studied effective training schedules, and they have compared distributed practice schedules to massed practice schedules. Most of the results consistently show that a distributed practice schedule outperforms a massed practice schedule in a retention test, because of the spacing effect in human memory. This result may lead new scientists who want to investigate knowledge and skills acquisition to explore just these two schedules and compare them in retention tests without examining other options. However, I think that we need to consider and approach another way for knowledge and skills acquisition. According to Anderson’s (1982, 1993) ACT-R theory, skill acquisition is the process of transition from declarative memory to procedural memory, and in the fully procedural stage, human beings do not need to retrieve their declarative memory to implement a task, even if they forgot the knowledge in declarative memory, they can perform the whole task without any errors. Based on his findings and theory, the most important factor in learning is how to transform learned knowledge to the procedural stage of the learning framework, and the research for learning should not compare two relatively extreme schedules, but make an appropriate schedule that could transfer learners to the procedural stage for each piece of knowledge. In this paper, I will present a candidate approach to make an appropriate schedule for getting better performance in knowledge and skill retention, and as a doctoral consortium paper, I hope I have useful advices for theoretical approach of the ACT-R cognitive architecture in this topic.