Practice or application problems can help students understand and retain information on a topic longer than passively listening to a lecture (Rohrer and Taylor 2006).
Practice problems can include vocabulary questions, math problems, case studies, or discussion prompts that allow students to work with course information to answer problems. Research indicates that distributed practice (having more than one opportunity to practice) is more effective for improving content retention than a single practice problem session (massed practice; Rohrer and Taylor 2006).
Additionally, it is beneficial to provide students with structure when using practice problems including the sequence of steps, any hints or reminders, equations and formulas, or guiding questions to help students work through the problems (Hardjito 2010). When instructors are demonstrating how to solve a problem, it is important to show as many steps as possible and provide explanations for how you are thinking while solving the problem to ensure students are following the process for solving the problem and to increase student metacognition skills.
Incorporating common errors and misconceptions into practice problems can aid student learning. One method for using incorrect problems is providing two explanations (one correct and the other with common errors or misconceptions) for a problem and having students discuss which of these answers is correct and why it is correct (Coppola and Pontrello 2014).
Alternatively, having students work together to determine why an answer is incorrect can also help students to better understand the process involved in answering a question. For example, providing an incorrectly worked math-based problem with all work shown and then having pairs of students determine which steps were done incorrectly before discussing the errors in the problem as a class.
Coppola, B. P. and J. K. Pontrello (2014) Using errors to teach through a two-staged, structured review: peer-reviewed quizzes and “What’s wrong with me?”. Journal of Chemical Education 91:2148-2154.
Hardjito, D. (2010) The use of scaffolding approach to enhance students’ engagement in learning structural analysis. International Education Studies 3:130-135.
Rohrer, D. and K. Taylor (2006) The effects of overlearning and distributed practice on the retention of mathematics knowledge. Applied Cognitive Psychology 20:1209-1224.