Independent research report

Improving student achievement with phase-6 (Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, UK)

Don Passey (Senior Research Fellow)	Prof. Peter Morris (Psychology Department)	Dr. Catherine Fritz (Educational Research)

In early 2009, a team of educational scientists at Lancaster University in the UK, led by Don Passey, Peter Morris and Catherine Fritz, presented the preliminary results of their independent research conducted on the correlation of student achievement and phase-6 use. More extensive, long-term research is currently under way. 

The following points are extracted from the summary of findings of the preliminary studies conducted with high school students in California and Germany:

1. Considerable recent research in the US and the UK has looked at the benefits that can arise from appropriate uses of spaced retrieval practice, which forms the basis of the phase-6 methodology. Expanding retrieval practice has been shown to be effective in many situations, not only for students, but also for adults, pre-school and older children, and the elderly.

2. An analysis of test results indicates a positive impact of phase-6, both at the level of improved performance, and of improved prediction of performance. However, it was not possible to draw a firm conclusion that the differences in performance identified were due to phase-6 alone. Further data would have been needed to eliminate alternative explanations. To this end, more extensive research is being conducted.

3. Pupils who had used phase-6 in their previous schools saw it as helpful and tended to use it again.

4. In one of the schools it could be shown that students who used phase-6 daily gained higher test scores at levels of statistical significance in comparison to those using phase-6 less regularly, when translating nouns, adjectives, prepositions and connectives in sentence contexts in a receptive direction.
From a scientific point of view, phase-6 provides an opportunity to set up focused research studies, since the resource offers support in quite specific areas of learning, namely in the areas of memorization, retrieval and practice.

Future studies will draw on findings from the preliminary studies and will gather both qualitative and quantitative evidence, in order to provide more detailed data on the long-term impact of phase-6 on student achievement and further insight into the conditions necessary for its optimal effectiveness.

At phase-6 we have a clear focus on continued development of our methodology and are always seeking to integrate new scientific findings and customer feedback.

To name just one example of a new feature introduced as a direct result of recommendations made by the team of educational scientists from Lancaster University:

Version 2.1.1 includes a new setting that allows the user to select that an item which has been answered incorrectly moves back one phase only, instead of all the way back to phase 1. The research team pointed out that this would have an even more positive effect on student motivation.  Furthermore, after several exposures and correct retrievals a memory trace is present, even if the item if not retrieved correctly once. Thus, it is not necessary for the item to move all the way back to the very first phase. Additionally, this new setting makes studying with phase-6 even more efficient.