| Guided by the background of ease the burden of excessive homework and offcampus tutoring for students undergoing compulsory education policy,the question of how to reduce students’ burden has become a more current concern,and researchers hope that students can get sufficient rest and still keep their grades.Therefore,the use of learning strategies to help students improve their performance has been the subject of many researchers,and in recent years,research on rest and memory has become a new direction to break through this problem.The Resting Effect is a learning strategy that has been used by researchers in recent years to help learners close their eyes for a few minutes after studying so that they can perform better on subsequent tests and improve their performance compared to engaging in other cognitively distracting activities that consume cognitive resources after studying,Especially for children with relatively weak learning abilities.Previous studies have compared rest with interference phases to derive the beneficial effects of rest on memory enhancement,but it is unclear whether rest can eliminate the effects of subsequent interference on performance,so the present study examined the effects of rest on English underachievers memory retention by exploring the different phases of rest and interference after testing.In addition,recent EEG studies have shown that brain activity patterns differed during the rest after learning encoding and the rest after the test,and only the EEG activity during the rest after encoding phase differed significantly from the rest in the baseline condition.These results also suggest that post-encoding rest may have a more important role.Therefore,the present study further explored the effects that rest and interference after coding versus after testing had on learning outcomes of English underachievers,so as to help them accomplish their learning goals in a more reasonable amount of time,improve their academic performance.This study consisted of two experiments,and Experiment 1 examined the effect of post-test rest on resistance to interference.Experiment 1 selected 80 children and used a mixed experimental design with 4(rest conditions: interference followed by rest,rest followed by interference,rest for 10 min,and rest for 15 min)× 3(recall conditions: immediate test,delayed test,and test after one week).Experiment 2selected 128 children and used a 2(post-encoding condition: rest,interference)× 2(post-test condition: rest,interference)between-subjects experimental design to examine the effects of rest and interference after encoding and testing on memory retention.The results of the free recall task in Experiment 1 found that immediately after testing,the difference in retention between the one-week post-test and the delayed test was greater in the rest-before-rest condition than in the rest-before-interference condition;and in the cue extraction task,the difference in retention between the oneweek post-test and the same-day delayed test was greater in the rest-before-rest condition than in the rest-before-interference condition as well as in the no retention rates in the interference condition.Thus,a short break after an immediate test can resist subsequent interference,and a break after experiencing interference has a smaller effect on performance.Experiment 2 by analyzing the free recall results we found that the memory performance in the free recall test task was significantly higher in the post-encoding rest condition than in the post-encoding interference condition,and in addition comparing the post-test conditions revealed that the post-test rest as well as the post-test interference did not significantly differ in memory performance two days later from that on the day of learning,thus memory retention of newly learned knowledge was facilitated by a short rest after learning.Therefore,the present study concluded that,first,resting after the immediate test could resist the effects of subsequent interference activities on memory and make English underachievers’ memory more robust.Second,resting after encoding can be more beneficial for memory retention of English underachievers than the postencoding interference condition.Thirdly,a post-test will result in a more robust memory,thus diminishing the effect of subsequent rest. |
