We as learning professionals can conclude that the spacing effect (1) is real, (2) that it applies to all human beings, (3) that it is relevant to most situations, (4) that it is a powerful learning factor, and (5) that we ought to be utilizing it in our learning designs!
The spacing effect, if not the most studied learning factor, is certainly in the top five. As Harry Bahrick and Lynda Hall said in 2005, “The spacing effect is one of the oldest and best documented phenomena in the history of learning and memory research.”
The results of this study revealed that spacing educational lessons apart in time promoted both simple and complex generalization. Moreover, the results indicated that the benefits of spacing lessons apart in time were present one week after the last lesson.
Moreover, the spacing effect may be one contributing factor to the success of other educational interventions that have demonstrated success in promoting learning and generalization.
With properly spaced repetition, you increase the intervals of time between learning attempts. Each learning attempt reinforces the neural connections. For example, we learn a list better if we repeatedly study it over a period of time than if we tackle it in one single burst. We're actually more efficient this way.
The spacing effect refers to the finding that long-term memory is enhanced when learning events are spaced apart in time, rather than massed in immediate succession (see Ebbinghaus, 1885/1964, for the first study on the spacing effect).
The spacing effect demonstrates that learning is more effective when repeated in spaced-out sessions. By repeating and spacing out information individuals learn, they can better recall that information in the future.
The spacing effect (also known as distributed practice) refers to the finding that two or more learning opportunities that are spaced apart, or distributed, in time produce better learning than the same opportunities that occur in close succession.
spacing effect. the tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention than is achieved through massed study or practice.
Spaced repetition is a more effective technique for learning because it is in sync with the manner our brains function. Researchers have proven that the brain is not well adapted to storing lots of new information in short periods of times.
When your child uses spaced learning, the material is able to make its way into his or her long-term memory instead. That's why spaced learning works. Eventually, your child won't need to work to remember—he or she will be able to recall the information quickly from his or her long-term memory.
These are the four steps you need to take to use spaced repetition:Plan the spacing intervals of your study sessions.Review and study the information for the first time.Recall the information at the first spacing interval.Keep recalling the information at chosen spacing intervals.
How does the spacing effect relate to distributed practice and recall? In both you use multiple study sessions to learn and rehearse information. Encoding on a basic level based on the structure or look of the word.
This is known as spaced practice or distributed practice. By “spacing” learning activities out over time (for example, 1 to 2 hours every other day, or at least once per week, rather than a 12-hour marathon cramming session), you will be able to learn more information and retain it longer.
Spaced practice or distributed practice is the idea that practising a particular skill or retrieving particular information is more effective when spread over time, rather than repeated sequentially over a short time period.
At a cognitive level, spaced training may provide more opportunities to practice what we've just learned, both consciously and unconsciously. And, retrieving the information may strengthen the neural pathways undergirding the memory, making it easier to cue up later.
The spacing effect is a far more effective way to learn and retain information that works with our brain instead of against it. Find out how to use it here.
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), a German psychologist and pioneer of quantitative memory research, first identified the spacing effect. After earning his PhD in Germany, he traveled to London. Like so many people, he found his life forever changed by a book.
Spaced repetition… [is] extraordinarily efficient. In a four-month period, practising for 30 minutes a day, you can expect to learn and retain 3600 flashcards with 90 to 95 percent accuracy. These flashcards can teach you an alphabet, vocabulary, grammar, and even pronunciation. And they can do it without becoming tedious because they’re always challenging enough to remain interesting and fun.
Memory mastery comes from repeated exposure to the material. Ebbinghaus observes, “Left to itself every mental content gradually loses its capacity for being revived, or at least suffers loss in this regard under the influence of time.” Cramming is not an effective memorization strategy. Lacking the robustness developed in later sessions, crammed facts soon vanish. Even something as important and frequently used as language can decay if not put into use.
The learning curve is the inverse. It illustrates the rate at which we learn new information. When we use spaced repetition, the forgetting curve changes:
Forgetting and learning are, in a counterintuitive twist, linked. When we review close to the point of nearly forgetting, our brains reinforce the memory as well as add new details. This is one reason practice papers and teaching other people are the most effective ways for students to revise—they highlight what has been forgotten.
There is a way to slow down the process of forgetting. We need only to recall or revisit the information after we originally come across it. Going over the information later, at intervals, helps us remember a greater percentage of the material. Persistence will allow us to recall with 100% accuracy all that we want to remember.
The spacing effect refers to the finding that long-term memory is enhanced when learning events are spaced apart in time, rather than massed in immediate succession (see Ebbinghaus, 1885/1964, for the first study on the spacing effect). The spacing effect is arguably the most replicable and robust finding from experimental psychology. Hundreds of articles, including a number of reviews (e.g., Dempster, 1988) and meta-analyses (e.g., Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006), have found a spacing effect in a wide variety of memory tasks.
The spacing effect describes the robust finding that long-term learning is promoted when learning events are spaced out in time, rather than presented in immediate succession . Studies of the spacing effect have focused on memory processes rather than for other types of learning, such as the acquisition and generalization of new concepts. In this study, early elementary school children (5–7 year-olds; N= 36) were presented with science lessons on one of three schedules: massed, clumped, and spaced. The results revealed that spacing lessons out in time resulted in higher generalization performance for both simple and complex concepts. Spaced learning schedules promote several types of learning, strengthening the implications of the spacing effect for educational practices and curriculum.
For the simple generalization sub-score, children received one point for each correct response, with a possible total of four points. For the complex generalization sub-score, children received one point for each correct response, with a possible total of four points (see Table 1).
The difference scores were calculated by subtracting the pre-test sub-score from the post-test sub-score. We then conducted two univariate ANOVAs, with difference score as the outcome variable.
The results of this study revealed that spacing educational lessons apart in time promoted both simple and complex generalization. Moreover, the results indicated that the benefits of spacing lessons apart in time were present one week after the last lesson. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate that spaced learning promotes complex generalization. Thus, these results have several implications for theory and research, which are discussed below.
The few studies that have investigated spaced learning and generalization have required learners to make simple generalizations. In these studies, participants are required to recognize common perceptual features of learning events, such as the visual characteristics of a painter’s style (Kornell & Bjork, 2008) or the common shape of a set of novel objects (Vlach et al., 2008), in order to generalize to novel exemplars. However, the question of whether spacing promotes more complex generalizations, which are based upon more abstract structures than perceptual features, has remained unexamined.
The spacing effect is the finding that repetitions that are spaced over time produce better long-term remembering than the exact same repetitions spaced over a shorter amount of time or massed all together. About 10 new scientific studies are carried out each year on the spacing effect (I counted 31 in the last three years).
About 10 new scientific studies are carried out each year on the spacing effect (I counted 31 in the last three years). Why such frenzied dedication to exploring the spacing effect? Scientists want to know what causes it! It’s really rather fascinating!
Learners may be forced to retrieve spaced items (compared with massed items that need no retrieval—because they are still top of mind). Learners may be prompted to engage in more difficult retrieval of spaced items (compared with massed items) and longer-spaced items (compared with shorter-spaced items).
In it, he finds that there are six main theories for why the spacing effect occurs. I’ve simplified his list into five theoretical explanations and I’ve ignored his somewhat jargony labels to help normal folks like me and you grok the meaning.
In this post, I’m looking at Geoffrey Maddox’s review of the spacing research, which was published just last year in 2016 and is the most recent review available (although given the interest in spacing, there are many reviews in the scientific literature). He does a spectacular job making sense of the many strands of research.
We as learning professionals can conclude that the spacing effect (1) is real, (2) that it applies to all human beings, (3) that it is relevant to most situations, (4) that it is a powerful learning factor, and (5) that we ought to be utilizing it in our learning designs!
The spacing effect, if not the most studied learning factor, is certainly in the top five. As Harry Bahrick and Lynda Hall said in 2005, “The spacing effect is one of the oldest and best documented phenomena in the history of learning and memory research.”
The Basics of the Spacing Effect. The “Spacing Effect” is essential in studying during your high school or college years but very few people are taught about this. This concept is basically saying that it is easier to obtain information when the study sessions are “spaced out” rather than all in one sitting.
Simone Kauffeld explained the spacing effect as being useful in the work place as well. This can be used in a field dealing with behavior, psychology, sales, and anything else really. As long as you apply yourself and use the proper criteria, you will be setting yourself up for success.
The first assumes maintains that the spacing effect refers to the changes in the semantic interpretations of items which cause the effect while the second holds that variability surrounding context is responsible for the spacing effect, not only semantic variability.
The spacing effect is present, however, for items presented four or six times and tested after a 24-hour delay. The result was interesting because other studies using only twice-presented items have shown a strong spacing effect, although the lag between learning and testing was longer.
Mammarella, Russo, & Avons (2002) also demonstrated that changing the orientation of faces between repeated presentations served to eliminate the spacing effect. Unfamiliar faces do not have stored representations in memory, thus the spacing effect for these stimuli would be a result of perceptual priming. Changing orientation served to alter the physical appearance of the stimuli, thus reducing the perceptual priming at the second occurrence of the face when presented in a massed fashion. This led to equal memory for faces presented in massed and spaced fashions, hence eliminating the spacing effect.
The spacing effect and its underlying mechanisms have important applications to the world of advertising. For instance, the spacing effect dictates that it is not an effective advertising strategy to present the same commercial back-to-back (massed repetition). Spaced ads were remembered better than ads that had been repeated back to back. Layout variations presented in short spacing intervals also resulted in improved recall compared to ads presented in exact repetition. The same effect was also achieved in a study involving website advertisements. It was revealed that sales diminish progressively as the customer visited the site and was exposed to the ad several times. However, if the elapsed time between the visits was longer, the advertisement had a bigger effect on sales. If encoding variability is an important mechanism of the spacing effect, then a good advertising strategy might include a distributed presentation of different versions of the same ad.
According to research conducted by Pyc and Rawson (2009) successful but effortful retrieval tasks during practice enhance memory in an account known as the retrieval effort hypothesis. Spacing out the learning and relearning of items leads to a more effortful retrieval which provides for deeper processing of the item.
The notion of the efficacy of the increased variability of encoding is supported by the position that the more independent encodings are, the more different types of cues are associated with an item. There are two types of encoding variability theory that address the spacing effect.
The encoding variability theory holds that performance on a memory test is determined by the overlap between the available contextual information during the test and the contextual information available during the encoding. According to this view, spaced repetition typically entails some variability in presentation contexts, resulting in a greater number of retrieval cues. Contrastingly, massed repetitions have limited presentations and therefore fewer retrieval cues. The notion of the efficacy of the increased variability of encoding is supported by the position that the more independent encodings are, the more different types of cues are associated with an item.