A German psychologist reported the answer more than a hundred and thirty years ago, and hundreds of studies since have agreed with him. It costs nothing, needs no technique and beats the method almost everyone defaults to the night before a test. What is strange is that nobody can say exactly why it works. What is it?
Spreading study sessions out over a long period. The enhances long-term learning and retention, and is far better than cramming. In one example, students who took a review quiz eight days after a lecture beat those who took the same quiz one day after it, on a final test five weeks later.
The question of how best to retain information has been more or less resolved for a long time. The answer is to space multiple study sessions over a long period. Hermann Ebbinghaus first reported the phenomenon more than a hundred and thirty years ago. Hundreds of studies have since shown that spacing enhances long-term learning and retention, and that it beats cramming the night before an exam.
A York University experiment makes the shape of it concrete. Students attended a forty-five minute lecture on meteorology. Half took an online quiz one day later, half took it eight days later, and everyone took a final test five weeks after their own quiz. The students who had waited eight days performed significantly better. The effect is not confined to science classes either: it helps with memorizing Japanese vocabulary, and with adults learning English as a second language.
Animals show it too, which is what makes the biology accessible. trained with ten odor and shock pairings in immediate succession avoid the odor for three days. Spaced training stretches that to a week or more, against a lifespan of roughly fifty days. Similar clues turn up in sea slugs and rodents.
The leading account is that spaced learning activates the cellular processes that build and maintain long-term memories, including transcription factors such as , which switches on genes thought to strengthen connections between neurons. CREB needs time, so spacing may give it room, each session building on the last. At the cognitive level, spacing offers more chances to practice, and itself strengthens the pathways. Fitting those levels together, as one neuroscientist quoted in the article says, is where the understanding runs out.
wat. Space the sessions out and the memory holds. A hundred and thirty years on, nobody can tell you exactly why.
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The effect is as settled as anything in learning research and as widely ignored. The mechanism is where the uncertainty actually sits.
How do we know?
A BrainFacts article from the Society for Neuroscience, summarizing the experimental literature on spaced learning and the cellular and cognitive explanations currently on offer.
What is still unknown
A science explainer, not a study. One researcher quoted in it puts the state of the mechanism bluntly: there are many levels of analysis and very little is understood about how they fit together.
Learn something?
Where to next
Does drawing a word fix it in memory better than writing it out?memory
Who decides which of today’s memories you still have tomorrow?memory
Should you take notes when watching a lecture at double speed?learning