What makes distributed practice effective

You would typically show your students how to do it, do a few together, then you would have your students do it themselves see the I Do — We Do — You Do model. You often ask them to do quite a few practice problems to help your students cement the steps in their minds.

When these practice problems are bunched together, such as within a single lesson or small number of consecutive lessons your students are undertaking massed practice. Massed practice is quite common in many classrooms. We often plan to teach content in topic based blocks. Yet, it is not the most effective way of helping your students to learn.

But why? German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus found that after learning new information, we rapidly forget that information followed by a more gradual loss over time. This can be shown visually as the forgetting curve. Information learned through massed practice is subject to this forgetting curve. More recent research has shown that we can accurately predict the changing rate of forgetting using a precise mathematical function.

Distributed practice involves students practising something over several sessions spaced out over time. This is quite different to massed practice , where the practice occurs in one intensive block. With spaced practice, you may show your students how to find the volume of a rectangular prism on a Monday.

Then they complete practice problems:. In class, straight away. For homework Tuesday night. In class on Wednesday. For homework on Thursday night. The two most widely accepted today are the contextual variability theory and study-phase retrieval.

Since the processes that are proposed by these two theories are not mutually exclusive, it is highly likely that both processes work together. Contextual variability refers to the fact that when a memory is encoded, many contextual features, both external and internal in which the event occurred is also encoded.

Imagine meeting a person for the first time at a social gathering and you would like to remember their face and name at a later time. Along with the name and face, the location, the song that was playing in the background, who else was with you, what the occasion was and a whole host of other contextual information, whether you are consciously aware of them or not, is also encoded. These are external elements. Personal or internal elements, such as your emotional state at the time — excitement, anxiety or surprise are also encoded.

The basis of the contextual variability account of the spacing effect hangs on the fact that events that happen further apart are more likely to have more variable contextual elements than events that occur at one time or at times very close together. Thus, by spacing out study sessions, the information to be learned becomes associated with significantly more contextual elements than information that is learned in one long study session.

These contextual elements, then, can act as retrieval cues when retrieval of that information is required. The contextual variability being important for learning is also consistent with the finding that studying in multiple different locations across study sessions results in better memory than studying in the same location.

See here. The study-phase retrieval hypothesis for the spacing effect is based on the idea that the act of revisiting the material being learned results in retrieval of the original memory trace. Each time the information is visited, prior memories of the study material are retrieved and reactivated.

In the research literature, the learning advantage of distributed over massed practice is known as the spacing effect. In general, the research evidence is clear that spaced or distributed practice is superior to massed practice for long-term learning and retention. In other words, for each unit of time spent on review, you get more bang for your buck if the review is spaced or distributed instead of massed.

Often, this is translated into a warning against cramming before exams. It should, however, be noted that the spacing effect, to be precise, refers to the benefit of spaced or distributed reviews of the same information. It does not speak to the spreading out of the study of different material over several sessions or days e. There are a few different theories as to why distributed practice is advantageous.

According to the study-phase retrieval theory , each time you encounter an item during review, there is an attempted retrieval from memory. If that retrieval is successful i. In distributed practice, gaps between occurrences of an item make retrieval effortful, which benefits memory. In massed practice, you just saw the item and it is still on your mind, so there is no need to retrieve it from memory. Another explanation has to do with contextual variability. When information is encoded in memory, the surrounding context e.

With massed practice, the context surrounding each consecutive occurrence of an item is likely highly similar. But with distributed practice, the contexts are likely more variable due to the passage of time, resulting in the encoding of different contextual information that is more effective at cueing later retrieval.

A final, perhaps more intuitive, explanation is that when you encounter the same item back-to-back i. Although most of the prior studies on distributed practice examined memory for lists of random words or word pairs, the advantage of distributed practice has also been shown on tasks as diverse as spelling, phonics, grammar, recall of text and prose, and solving of math problems. It is true that the bulk of the past research has focused on memory e. Melody Wiseheart and colleagues showed that college students that received a spaced online review after a lecture were better able to apply the studied concepts to novel situations than students that received a massed online review.