Learn how small, evidence-based changes to your teaching can help athletic training students retain and apply more of what they learn. Grounded in learning science, this ATu session covers retrieval practice, spaced and interleaved learning, and worked examples you can use across classroom, lab, and clinical courses.

Featured Speaker: Christopher Schmidt, PhD, ATC

An athletic training professional for 30 years, Dr. Schmidt’s career spans clinical care, academic leadership, and professional service. From treating patients across diverse settings to shaping undergraduate and graduate programs, he’s a contributor in the field, influencing best practices through research and committee roles with the NATA and CAATE. His passion extends to curriculum design, interprofessional education, and youth sports injury prevention, helping to shape the future of athletic training.

00:00 Webinar Overview & Objectives

03:27 Strategy 1: Retrieval Practice

05:58 Using ATu for Retrieval Practice

11:02 Strategy 2: Spaced & Interleaved Practice

13:54 Using ATu for Spacing & Interleaved Practice

20:58 Strategy 3: Worked Examples + Fading

23:10 Using ATu for Worked Examples + Fading

26:54 Summary of Strategies and Classroom Implementation Tactics

27:44 Share Your Feedback & Questions; Webinar Wrap Up

Helpful Links: Complimentary Educator access | Educator resources | Set up a Demo

Three Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies That Cost Nothing (And Work Better Than Most Clinical Interventions)

What if we told you there are teaching strategies with effect sizes larger than most of the clinical interventions we teach our students—and they cost absolutely nothing to implement?

That’s not a hypothetical. It’s the reality we explored in our recent ATu faculty webinar on evidence-based teaching. As athletic training educators, we face constant pressure to enhance student engagement while ensuring our methods are grounded in solid research. The good news? Some of the most powerful teaching tactics don’t require new technology, additional budget, or even extra class time. They simply require us to teach differently.

We recently hosted a webinar diving into three learning science strategies that can transform how students retain and apply knowledge: retrieval practice, spacing and interleaved practice, and worked examples with fading. Each approach is backed by peer-reviewed research in health professions education, and each can be integrated naturally into your existing courses using ATu tools you already have at your disposal.

Retrieval Practice: Building Superhighways in the Brain

Retrieval practice moves beyond passive review. Instead of having students re-read notes or re-watch videos, we ask them to actively pull information from memory—and then do something with it. Think of it this way: each time students retrieve information, they’re not just accessing it; they’re strengthening the neural pathway that leads to it. It’s like transforming a faint footpath through a forest into a six-lane paved superhighway. The more times students travel that route, the stronger and more accessible it becomes.

The research here is remarkably consistent. The “testing effect”—also known as Testing Enhanced Learning (TEL)—is one of the most replicated findings in learning science. A 2018 Best Evidence Medical Education (BEME) review found effect sizes for transfer of learning ranging from 0.33 to 1.1. Those numbers are comparable to many therapeutic interventions we teach students to deliver in clinical practice. The key is keeping retrieval activities low-stakes or ungraded. High-stakes testing creates anxiety that can actually interfere with learning. But when students know they’re practicing without penalty, they engage more openly with the difficulty of recall—and that difficulty is precisely what drives deeper learning.

Here’s what this looks like in practice. Start your next class with a two-minute brain dump: “Close your notes, close your laptops. Write down everything you remember about last week’s topic.” No grading, no judgment—just retrieval. You can also assign three to five open-ended questions after students watch ATu videos before class, then use those questions as discussion starters when you meet. This verifies they’ve watched the material and gives you immediate insight into knowledge gaps.

Within ATu, this is straightforward to implement. Use the “copy page title with link” option in Educator Tools to drop video links into your LMS with a due date attached. Or take advantage of our pre-made lab handouts in the teaching content section—they’re already hyperlinked and ready to customize for your course. The goal isn’t to add more work; it’s to replace passive review time with active retrieval.

Spacing and Interleaving: Mirroring Real Clinical Practice

The second strategy addresses how we distribute learning over time and mix up content. Spacing spreads learning across multiple sessions rather than cramming it into one block. Interleaving mixes different but related topics during those sessions.

Here’s a concrete example. A student who practices goniometry for 20 minutes once will retain far less than a student who practices for five minutes across four different sessions. That’s spacing. And when you mix goniometry with manual muscle testing and palpation in the same lab session, rather than dedicating entire sessions to each skill in isolation, that’s interleaving. This approach mirrors what students will encounter in clinical practice. They won’t spend an entire day doing only goniometry or only therapeutic exercises. They’ll move from patient to patient, shifting between different skills, pathologies, diagnoses, and interventions. Our teaching should reflect that reality.

Students often resist this initially. They prefer what we call “blocked practice”—one topic, one day, comfortable and familiar. But comfort isn’t learning. The productive discomfort of having to discriminate between competing diagnoses or paradigms, to determine which clinical pattern applies in a given scenario—that’s where the real skill development happens.

One practical tactic is cumulative quizzing with the 70-30 rule: 70% of quiz content comes from the current unit, 30% from prior units. This simultaneously employs spacing and retrieval practice. You’re asking students to go back into earlier material while reinforcing current learning.

Another approach is the three-day revisit rule for lab classes. Instead of running three separate labs focused on three different skills, start each lab with a five-to-seven-minute warm-up reviewing skills from the previous week. This keeps pathways active without requiring you to redesign your entire curriculum.

ATu makes this easier through in-app case studies and the custom bookmark tool. Rather than curating mixed-topic review lists by hand, you can build them in minutes. Pull cases from different body regions or pathologies, create a bookmark list, and assign it as a review activity. Students engage with varied content in a single session, strengthening their ability to shift between different clinical contexts.

Worked Examples with Fading: Scaffolding Without Drowning

The third strategy has the most direct implications for how we design learning experiences. Worked examples with fading means we stop throwing novice learners into the deep end of complex problem-solving without support, just to see if they can survive. Instead, we pull back the curtain on our expert thought process. We start by showing students a fully worked patient case, narrating our clinical reasoning aloud as we move through it. Then we provide a half-worked case where they complete what we’ve left unfinished. Finally, we give them a new case to work through independently.

This approach is grounded in cognitive load theory, which recognizes that novice learners have limited working memory capacity. When we overload that capacity with too much information or complexity too soon, students spend all their mental energy trying to figure out how to approach a problem. Their working memory is too busy to actually work through the problem. There’s a crucial distinction here between productive struggle and unproductive struggle. Learning athletic training—with all its professional responsibilities, clinical skills, and decision-making demands—is inherently challenging. That’s productive struggle, and it’s worth it. But when a novice is drowning in working memory overload, they’re not learning. They’re coping. Worked examples front-load learning through scaffolding. Think of construction scaffolding around a building—it supports the work until the structure can stand on its own, then gradually gets removed. As students’ skills grow, we fade the scaffolding.

One powerful tactic is the narrative skill demonstration. Instead of silently demonstrating a special test or intervention while students watch, narrate your thought process: “I’m positioning the patient this way because… I’m checking to make sure I have this equipment ready… I’m placing my hands here to feel for…” That simple shift from silent to narrated demonstration is transformative for novice learners.

In ATu, you can work through an entire case study as the instructor, showing all answers while explaining your clinical reasoning. Then assign students to complete questions five through nine on their own. Eventually, they work through an entirely new case independently. You can also create paper cases and have students search ATu to build bookmark lists demonstrating their problem-solving process—another low-stakes assessment that builds clinical reasoning.

Making It Real on Monday Morning

During our webinar, we practiced what we preached. Midway through, we paused and asked participants to recall the first two strategies we’d covered—without looking at notes or previous slides. That brief moment of retrieval, that productive pause where everyone thought “wait, what were they again?”—that was the single most evidence-based teaching move in the entire session. And it illustrates something important: we don’t need to rescue the silence. That pause is the teaching. If those 20 seconds of recall felt long, it actually reveals how rarely we ask learners to retrieve information without immediately providing prompts or answers.

These strategies aren’t magic, and they can feel harder for students initially. But when we’re transparent about what we’re doing and why—when we explain that this difficulty is building stronger, more durable learning—students buy in. They experience their own growth and come to value the approach. None of these strategies require you to add class time. They’re replacements, not additions. Instead of passive review, you’re creating active retrieval. Instead of blocked practice, you’re spacing and interleaving. Instead of leaving novices to sink or swim, you’re scaffolding their development thoughtfully.

We’ve created a faculty resource guide with a Monday morning toolkit that includes drop-in templates for each strategy. You don’t have to build anything from scratch—just open the toolkit, adapt what you need, and you’re ready for your next class. As we continue exploring evidence-based teaching through our webinar series, we’re reminded that the best tools are often the simplest. They just require us to think differently about how learning actually happens—and to design our teaching around what the science tells us works. If you’d like to explore how to implement these strategies with ATu, or if you want to dive deeper into any of the tools and features we discussed, we’re here to help. This work—supporting athletic training educators in creating more effective, evidence-based learning experiences—is truly an honor. Your students deserve teaching grounded in what actually works, and we’re committed to making that as practical and accessible as possible.