Robert and Elizabeth Bjork: an interview

After a brief hiatus from recording and publishing podcasts over the Christmas period, we were delighted to be able to speak to Robert and Elizabeth Bjork at UCLA about their research. Robert and Elizabeth are perhaps best known for their work on “retrieval practice” – the idea that repeated testing is more effective as a mechanism for learning than repeated study.

Before Christmas, we put out calls for questions from teachers, researchers and others in the education sphere:

Our Director of Education, Dr Stuart Kime, was delighted to be able to collate the pick of the bunch, and put them to Robert and Elizabeth Bjork.

As well as covering retrieval practice itself, we also ask about how their research can be translated into the classroom, desirable difficulties, and their “soccer study”, among other things.

[Ed.: Apologies in advance that the audio quality isn’t up to our usual high standard – due to some technical difficulties, we had to resort to Plan B, which means the recording isn’t quite as crisp as it otherwise might have been! We hope you enjoy it nevertheless!]

All of our podcasts can be found in our resources section.