The Lie We Tell Ourselves

Sarah’s quarterly review went well. Her compliance training program had a 94% completion rate. Everyone passed the quiz. Leadership was pleased.

Three months later, a manager made a comment that clearly crossed the line. Nobody reported it.

When HR investigated, five employees gave the same answer: “I didn’t know that counted as harassment.” They’d all completed Sarah’s training. Every single one passed the final quiz. They remembered nothing.

Sarah knew the problem wasn’t her slides. The content was clear. The examples were relevant. The quiz tested the right material.

The problem was deeper: her learners never actually learned.

They recognized information during training. They forgot it afterward. And Sarah had no way to tell the difference until it was too late.

This is the central paradox of workplace training. We measure completion. We get forgetting. We design for immediate performance. We need lasting retention. We think we’re building knowledge. We’re building illusions.

The solution isn’t better videos or clearer slides. The solution is counterintuitive. Less presenting. More testing.

How This Fits: Building on What You Know

If you’ve read earlier articles in this series, you know effective learning often requires productive struggle. We explored how worked examples reduce cognitive load for novices, making complex skills more learnable. We examined how desirable difficulties enhance retention when applied correctly.

Testing—specifically, retrieval practice—belongs in the desirable difficulties family. It’s harder than reviewing notes. Less comfortable than rereading. And dramatically more effective than both.

Here’s the key insight: retrieval practice and worked examples aren’t contradictory. They’re complementary partners in a learning sequence.

Use worked examples when learners face genuinely novel material. Reduce extraneous load. Build initial schemas. Then—and this is critical—use retrieval practice to cement those schemas into long-term memory.

Think of it as two-stage construction. First, reduce unnecessary difficulty during initial learning. Then introduce productive difficulty during practice. The worked example teaches the concept. The retrieval practice makes it stick.

Timing matters. Sequence matters. Understanding when to scaffold and when to challenge separates effective training from theater.

Now let’s examine why retrieval works so powerfully—and why most organizations still aren’t using it.

The Evidence That Should Have Changed Everything

In 2006, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke ran an experiment that should have revolutionized workplace training.

It didn’t. At least not yet.

They had college students read passages about sea otters and the sun. After reading, students were randomly assigned to one of two groups:

Group 1: Study the passage four times  

Group 2: Study once, then take three practice tests (no feedback)

Five minutes later, Group 1 crushed it. They recalled more information. This makes intuitive sense—more exposure, more learning, right?

One week later, both groups returned for a surprise test.

The results flipped.

Students who took practice tests remembered 50% more than students who studied repeatedly (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Testing once produced better retention than studying four times.

Let that sink in. The students who studied less remembered more.

This wasn’t a fluke. The testing effect—also called retrieval practice—has been replicated hundreds of times across different ages, materials, and contexts. The meta-analyses are overwhelming:

Rowland (2014) analyzed dozens of studies comparing testing to restudying. Medium-to-large effect size (g = 0.50). Adesope et al. (2017) examined 217 studies spanning lab and classroom settings. Testing won consistently. Agarwal et al. (2021) conducted a systematic review focusing specifically on applied educational contexts—real classrooms, not just labs. The effect held.

The evidence is bulletproof. When you force learners to retrieve information from memory—to actively recall without looking—you create stronger, more durable learning than any passive review strategy.

But why? What happens during retrieval that makes it so powerful?

What Retrieval Actually Does to Your Brain

Most people think of tests as measurement tools. Ways to assess what learners know. But testing is a learning event. The act of retrieval physically changes the brain.

Let’s experience this directly.

Try this right now: Without looking back, write down the three groups from the Roediger and Karpicke study I just described. What did each group do?

Go ahead. Try it.

Notice what just happened in your mind. You had to search for the information. Maybe you pictured the paragraph where I described it. Maybe you remembered “Group 1 studied more” but couldn’t recall the exact number. Maybe you struggled.

That struggle? That’s retrieval. And it’s completely different from what happens when you reread.

Now scroll up and check your answer.

You just experienced three phenomena that make retrieval practice work:

The Effort Changes Everything

When you reread material, your brain takes a shortcut. You see information and think, “Yes, I know this.” You’re using recognition pathways. Recognition is passive. Easy. Comfortable.

And almost useless for long-term retention.

Retrieval is different. You must reconstruct the memory from scratch. No cues. No hints. Just your brain searching through networks of associations trying to locate and rebuild the information.

This reconstruction requires effort. Real cognitive work. And that effort is what strengthens the neural pathway. Each successful retrieval makes the next one easier. The memory becomes more accessible (Bjork, 1994).

Think of it like a trail through woods. Walking the same cleared path repeatedly keeps it maintained. But bushwhacking through overgrowth to find the trailhead? That’s retrieval. It’s harder. You might get lost. But when you succeed, you’ve created a clearer, more distinct path.

The difficulty is the mechanism. No struggle, no strengthening.

You Activate More Than You Retrieve

Here’s where it gets fascinating.

When you struggle to retrieve information, you don’t just strengthen the direct memory. You activate related information through spreading activation in semantic memory (Carpenter, 2009, 2011).

Imagine you’re trying to remember your company’s incident reporting procedure. As you struggle to recall “Document the incident immediately,” your brain activates related concepts: “Notify supervisor,” “Preserve evidence,” “Photos if possible,” “Follow up within 24 hours.”

These related concepts become linked to your target memory. They create multiple routes to the same destination.

Carpenter (2011) demonstrated this with word pairs. When learners retrieved weakly associated pairs like “basket” and “bread,” they spontaneously activated semantic mediators—related concepts like “grocery” or “bakery.” These mediators later served as additional retrieval cues. Restudying didn’t produce this effect.

For workplace application, this is critical. Real problems don’t arrive with helpful labels. Your employees won’t see a notification saying “Time to use your de-escalation training!” They need to access that knowledge spontaneously when a customer starts yelling.

Multiple access routes make spontaneous recall possible.

You Learn What You Actually Know

When Sarah’s employees restudied her harassment prevention slides, everything looked familiar. They thought they knew it. Familiarity felt like learning.

It wasn’t.

Retrieval reveals the truth. It exposes the gap between what you think you know and what you can actually recall. This is a metacognitive benefit—your ability to judge your own knowledge (Bjork, 1994).

Karpicke et al. (2009) studied how college students prepare for exams. The results were striking:

– 84% relied primarily on rereading

– Only 1% used self-testing as their main strategy

When asked why, students said rereading “felt more productive.” But their predictions about their own learning were systematically wrong. Students thought repeated studying would help. Testing actually helped more.

This is the illusion that sabotages most training. Rereading feels smooth and confident. Testing feels choppy and uncertain. But feelings deceive. The uncertainty during retrieval is a signal of learning, not failure.

Sarah’s employees felt confident after reviewing her slides. They were wrong. The quiz after training measured recognition—can you identify the right answer when you see it?—not retrieval. Recognition and retrieval are different animals. One works on the job. One doesn’t.

The Resistance You’ll Face (And Why It Matters)

Here’s the problem Sarah discovered when she redesigned her training: retrieval practice feels wrong to learners.

She sent her first spaced quiz one week after training. Simple questions. No tricks. Just “From memory, list three behaviors that constitute reportable harassment under company policy.”

The responses she got weren’t quiz answers. They were complaints.

“I don’t remember this. Can you send the slides again?”  

“This feels like a test. I thought we already passed the training.”  

“Why are you testing us? Don’t you trust us?”

Sarah had anticipated resistance. She hadn’t anticipated how visceral it would be.

But the research predicted this reaction perfectly. When Karpicke et al. (2009) surveyed students about study strategies, they found learners overwhelmingly prefer rereading because it feels productive. It’s smooth. Information flows easily. Learners mistake this fluency for learning.

Testing feels terrible. You get stuck. You blank on answers you “knew” five minutes ago. You feel uncertain. Learners interpret this difficulty as failure.

But that difficulty is the entire point.

Bjork (1994) calls this “desirable difficulty”—obstacles that impair performance during practice but enhance long-term retention. The struggle to retrieve is what makes retrieval practice work.

This creates a massive challenge for L&D professionals. Your learners will actively resist the strategy that helps them most. They’ll gravitate toward strategies that feel productive but accomplish little.

Sarah learned to reframe retrieval practice. Not as testing. As a workout for memory. Nobody expects exercise to feel effortless. The challenge is the mechanism of growth.

She told her team: “If this feels hard, that’s good. If you’re struggling to remember, that’s the point. Your brain is working. That work is what makes knowledge stick.”

Some grumbled. But after two months, something shifted. Employees started noticing they could answer questions without looking things up. The knowledge was just… there.

One employee told Sarah: “I hated those pop quizzes at first. But now, when a situation comes up, I actually remember the policy. I don’t have to search for it.”

That’s when Sarah knew it was working.

How to Actually Do This: Two Detailed Applications

Enough theory. Let’s walk through exactly how Sarah implemented retrieval practice—first in her compliance training, then in her technical skills program.

Application 1: Compliance Training That Actually Sticks

What Sarah Changed

Her old approach was typical: 45-minute module, information-dense slides, final quiz with answers visible on the screen above the questions. Pass rate: 95%. Retention three months later: maybe 30%.

Her new approach eliminated the end-of-training quiz entirely. Instead:

Day 1 (during training session, last 15 minutes):

Sarah presented core policy information in 30 minutes instead of 45. Then she closed the slides.

“Put away your notes. Close the handout. For the next 10 minutes, write everything you remember about what constitutes reportable harassment under our policy.”

Silence. Discomfort. People looked around nervously.

“No looking back,” Sarah said. “This isn’t graded. Just write what you remember.”

People struggled. They wrote a few things, crossed them out, wrote more. After 10 minutes, Sarah gave them a one-page reference sheet showing the actual policy elements.

“Compare what you wrote to this. Notice what you got right. Notice what you missed. That’s your learning.”

Week 2 (5 minutes via email):

Sarah sent a scenario:

“You witness a colleague make an ambiguous comment to another employee. The recipient looks uncomfortable but doesn’t say anything. Is this reportable under company policy? What’s your next step? Reply with your answer.”

After people responded, she sent the correct answer with a brief explanation. No scoring. No judgment. Just feedback.

Month 2 (10 minutes in team meeting):

Sarah presented a realistic case study. Pairs worked together: one person explained the policy, the other identified gaps or errors, then they switched roles.

Month 3 (5 minutes via Slack):

“Real situation from this week: [describes actual ambiguous incident]. How does this relate to our harassment policy?”

Sarah’s Results

Three months after training, she ran an unannounced quiz using realistic scenarios. Retention: 78%. Nearly three times better than her previous approach.

More importantly: when actual incidents occurred, employees actually reported them. They recognized the behavior. They knew the procedure. The knowledge was accessible when they needed it.

Implementation Details Sarah Learned:

The free-recall brain dump (Day 1) was crucial. It revealed gaps immediately while the information was fresh enough to correct. But it required Sarah to create a clear reference sheet for self-comparison. Without that, learners felt lost.

The spaced quizzes (Week 2, Month 2, Month 3) worked best when they pulled from all previous content, not just recent material. This prevented learners from forgetting early content while learning later content.

Email delivery worked fine for simple questions. For complex scenarios, team meetings created better engagement because people could discuss answers.

The biggest challenge was getting managers to protect the 5-10 minutes required for retrieval activities. Sarah had to show retention data to prove the time was worth it.

Application 2: Technical Skills Training (CRM System)

What Sarah’s Colleague Marcus Changed

Marcus ran software training for their sales team. His old approach: a full-day session where he demonstrated features while learners followed along. “Sandbox environment available for practice.” About 20% actually used it. Within the first month, 60% called the helpdesk for procedures they should have remembered.

His new approach split the training across two weeks with retrieval built in:

Session 1 (2 hours):

Marcus demonstrated core workflows:

– Creating a contact (10 minutes demo)

– Logging a call (10 minutes demo)

– Creating an opportunity (10 minutes demo)

Then he closed his screen. “Now you try—from memory. Create a contact using your own information. I’m not showing you the steps. Pull from what you just saw.”

People fumbled. Clicked the wrong buttons. Got lost. Marcus circulated to help but didn’t re-demonstrate. He prompted: “What did you see me do? What was the first step?”

This immediate retrieval after each demo took 30 minutes total. Messy. Inefficient. Effective.

Week 1 (5 minutes each morning):

Marcus sent daily retrieval prompts:

Monday: “Don’t open the CRM yet. Write down the steps to create a contact.”  

Tuesday: “Write the steps to log a call.”  

Wednesday: “Write the steps to create an opportunity.”  

Thursday: “Now combine them: Write the full workflow from new contact to logged opportunity.”  

Friday: “Scenario: Client calls with interest in Product X. Write your complete CRM workflow.”

After each prompt, people opened the CRM and tried the procedure. They compared what they wrote to what they actually had to do.

Week 2 (Session 2, 90 minutes):

Marcus presented progressively harder scenarios. Each one required retrieving earlier knowledge:

“Client wants Product X but has budget concerns. Create the contact, log this call, create an opportunity with notes about the budget issue.”

People worked from memory. Real client data. Real consequences for errors. Marcus provided help only for genuine system bugs, not forgotten procedures.

Marcus’s Results

Within two weeks, 80% of the sales team was independently proficient. Previously this took two months. Helpdesk calls for “how do I…” questions dropped by 70%.

Sales reps could execute workflows without references. When weird edge cases appeared, they could figure them out because they understood the logic, not just the steps.

Implementation Details Marcus Learned:

The immediate retrieval after each demo (Session 1) was the most important intervention. It revealed mistakes while Marcus was there to help. Waiting until later would have let errors solidify.

The daily prompts required only 5 minutes but had to be consistent. Missing a day broke the spacing pattern. Marcus automated them using email scheduling.

The hardest part was resisting the urge to re-demonstrate when people struggled. His instinct was to jump in and show them again. But making them figure it out—with prompts, not answers—was what made knowledge stick.

Marcus learned to use two-part questions: “Write the steps” (retrieval) then “Now try it” (practice). The retrieval before practice was what made practice effective.

The Other Applications: Quick Hits

Product knowledge for customer service: Daily “customer question of the day” sent via Slack. Reps answer from memory. Correct answer shared after responses come in. Three months: customer satisfaction scores up 12% because reps can answer questions without putting customers on hold.

New hire onboarding: Weekly “teach-back” sessions where new hires explain company procedures to each other. Manager observes, corrects errors. Time to productivity: down 18 days compared to traditional onboarding.

The pattern is consistent. Replace review with retrieval. Space it out. Make it effortful. Measure retention, not completion.

The Bottom Line: What Changes in Your Training

Most organizations build training like this:

1. Deliver information

2. Check understanding with a quiz

3. Issue certificate

4. Hope learners remember

Sarah learned to flip this completely:

1. Deliver information (briefly)

2. Force immediate retrieval

3. Space retrieval over weeks

4. Measure actual retention weeks later

The shift is from “Did they complete it?” to “Can they recall it without help?”

This requires three fundamental changes in how you design training:

First, measure retention, not completion.

Stop celebrating 95% completion rates. Start measuring what learners remember two weeks, four weeks, and three months after training. Use unannounced quizzes with realistic scenarios. If completion is high but retention is low, your training failed.

Sarah now tracks two metrics: immediate quiz scores (which she expects to be high) and delayed retention scores (which reveal actual learning). Only the second metric matters for program success.

Second, replace every review session with retrieval.

Every time you’re tempted to “review the key points,” stop. Instead, ask learners to retrieve the key points from memory. No slides. No handouts. Just retrieval. Then show them what they missed.

Sarah eliminated all her “refresher” training. She replaced it with spaced quizzes that force retrieval of previous content. The time commitment is 20% of what refreshers required. The retention is 3x better.

Third, embrace forgetting as a feature.

The forgetting curve is your friend. Let learners forget a little between retrieval sessions. When they struggle to remember, that difficulty strengthens the memory.

Sarah spaces her quizzes strategically: 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months. Each retrieval resets the forgetting curve at a higher baseline. After four retrievals, knowledge sticks for 6+ months without additional intervention.

Your Checklist for the Next Training Program

You’re designing new training. Here’s what changes:

During Design:

– Cut your presentation time by 30%. Use that time for retrieval instead.

– Write 20-30 retrieval questions spanning simple recall to complex application.

– Schedule retrieval sessions at 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months.

– Choose question formats: free recall for complex concepts, short answer for procedures, multiple choice only when you need to scale beyond what you can manually review.

– Plan feedback: immediate for high-stakes content (safety, compliance), delayed by one day for everything else.

During Rollout:

– Tell learners why you’re doing this: “This will feel hard. That means it’s working. The struggle is what makes knowledge stick.”

– Make first retrieval happen immediately after initial training, before learners leave.

– Monitor completion of spaced retrieval, not just initial training. If people skip the spaced quizzes, they’ll forget everything.

– Watch success rates. If below 40%, the questions are too hard. If above 90%, they’re too easy. Target 60-75% success.

During Measurement:

– Test retention at 2-4 weeks with unannounced quiz.

– Compare to previous version of same training (or to control group).

– Measure on-the-job application through manager observation or real performance data.

– Calculate time-to-proficiency versus your baseline.

During Iteration:

– Identify which specific content is forgotten most often.

– Add extra retrieval practice for those trouble spots.

– Experiment with spacing intervals (some content needs more frequent retrieval).

– Test different question formats to find what works for different content types.

Sarah now designs all training this way. Her programs take less time to deliver. They cost less to maintain. And they produce dramatically better retention.

Her secret? She makes learning uncomfortable. And she’s stopped apologizing for it.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Retrieval practice works. The evidence is overwhelming. Hundreds of studies. Multiple meta-analyses. Consistent effects across ages, materials, and contexts.

But it requires you to do something that feels wrong: make learning harder.

Your instinct is to make training smooth, easy, comfortable. Clear slides. Engaging videos. Lots of review. Retrieval practice is choppy, difficult, frustrating. Learners struggle. They forget. They complain.

And that’s exactly why it works.

When Sarah’s employees said “This is hard,” she learned to hear “This is working.” When they said “I don’t remember this,” she learned to hear “My brain is building stronger pathways.” When they complained about “too much testing,” she learned to hear “I’m experiencing desirable difficulty.”

The struggle is the signal.

Your job isn’t to make learning feel easy. Your job is to make learning last.

Sarah learned this when she stopped measuring completion rates and started measuring retention. When she stopped asking “Did they like the training?” and started asking “Can they actually do their jobs better?”

The answer surprised her. Her new training was less popular in post-training surveys. People complained about the quizzes. They wanted more slides, more review, more support.

But six months later, when she measured performance, her new approach won decisively. People retained more. They performed better. They needed less remedial training.

The training that felt worse worked better.

Sarah now tells new L&D professionals: “If learners say your training is too easy, you’re failing them. If they say it’s too hard, you might be failing them. But if they say it’s challenging but they can feel themselves getting better, you’re doing it right.”

Retrieval practice is how you do that. It’s how you build knowledge that lasts beyond the training room.

It’s how you turn completion into competence.

—

References

Adesope, O. O., Trevisan, D. A., & Sundararajan, N. (2017). Rethinking the use of tests: A meta-analysis of practice testing. *Review of Educational Research, 87*(3), 659–701.

Agarwal, P. K., Nunes, L. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2021). Retrieval practice consistently benefits student learning: A systematic review of applied research in schools and classrooms. *Educational Psychology Review, 33*(4), 1409–1453.

Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe & A. Shimamura (Eds.), *Metacognition: Knowing about knowing* (pp. 185–205). MIT Press.

Carpenter, S. K. (2009). Cue strength as a moderator of the testing effect: The benefits of elaborative retrieval. *Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35*(6), 1563–1569.

Carpenter, S. K. (2011). Semantic information activated during retrieval contributes to later retention: Support for the mediator effectiveness hypothesis of the testing effect. *Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37*(6), 1547–1552.

Karpicke, J. D., Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practise retrieval when they study on their own? *Memory, 17*(4), 471–479.

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. *Psychological Science, 17*(3), 249–255.

Rowland, C. A. (2014). The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: A meta-analytic review of the testing effect. *Psychological Bulletin, 140*(6), 1432–1463.