Understanding why delayed answers improve learning

It may seem that getting instant results would enhance learning, but various studies indicate a benefit to feedback that is delayed. Test takers are more likely to retain the correct answer if they receive it several seconds after providing their answers rather than immediately.
To understand why delayed answers improve learning, researchers at Iowa State University asked college students to give their best guess to trivia questions such as “Who coined the word ‘nerd’?” and “What color is a grasshopper's blood?” and to rate how curious they were about each answer. For half of the items, participants learned the correct answer immediately after responding to the question. For the remaining items, the answers either followed a four-second delay or an unpredictable interval of two, four or eight seconds. The students were then tested on the questions after engaging in unrelated distracting tasks.

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