Combining student-managed spaced practice and cognitive load theory to improve disadvantaged Indonesian secondary students’ mathematics word-problem learning: A co-designed classroom experiment

Primary research question: In disadvantaged Indonesian secondary classrooms, does student-managed spacing during worked-example instruction improve mathematics word-problem learning (near and far transfer) and reduce indicator of working-memory resource depletion relative to massed practice, and how do these effects compare with teacher-managed spacing?

More specifically, the study asks whether combining student-managed learning with spaced practice, grounded in CLT, can also improve disadvantaged Indonesian secondary students’ mathematics word problem performance and reduce working memory resource depletion. Therefore, the current study tests the following hypotheses regarding the combined effects:

Hypotheses (primary outcome: far transfer):

• Spaced practice will yield higher near and far transfer performance and less evidence of post-learning working-memory resource depletion than massed practice.
• The spacing advantage will be at least as large under student-managed timing as under teacher-managed timing.
• Student-managed learning will yield higher far transfer than teacher-managed learning (with near transfer expected to be less sensitive).

We will examine whether any management-related benefits are mediated by differences in study-time allocation and break timing within the fixed total learning time.

There will be two phases for this study: Phase 1 - co-design educational intervention (applying the self-managed and spacing effects) and materials with Indonesian schoolteachers; Phase 2 - evaluate the intervention and materials by running a small-scale experiment in Indonesia. The two-phase structure ensures that the intervention is contextually appropriate and co-owned by local teachers before its effects are rigorously evaluated in a controlled experiment.

Phase 1: Co-design educational intervention and materials. We will invite 2 to 3 schoolteachers teaching secondary mathematics to co-design the learning materials and the educational intervention for the experiment. The schoolteachers will be recruited by collaborating with the Indonesian Center for Cognitive Load Research (ICCLR) (https://sites.google.com/uny.ac.id/icclr/home) at Yogyakarta State University.

Phase 2: Evaluate the materials and educational intervention via a small-scale experiment.