What is the difference between distributed practice and cramming

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She loves math now and asked me to take her When you would think it would be the other way around. 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. More research is needed, but I think there is growing evidence that the benefit of distributed practice goes beyond just improved memory.

Cepeda and colleagues compared the effects of different spacing lags on different retention intervals the time between the last review and the final test. The findings suggest that after initially learning facts, the optimal gap before having a review session is about 10 to 30 percent of the retention interval.

For example, if the retention interval is seven days, then you would be best served by having the review session one day after initial learning. If the retention interval is long say, 70 days , then the optimal gap also grows 21 days. Yet, there is no clear-cut answer as to how far apart learning sessions should be. We will never be able to empirically test all the various combinations of factors e. As for how many learning sessions there should be, again there is no simple answer.

Like before, it all depends on a number of factors:. The stark reality is that forgetting is ubiquitous, and the only way to preserve high levels of performance and retention is to have periodic spaced review sessions. The nice thing about spaced review sessions is that there are savings in relearning—i. For example, if you learned a foreign language in high school but can no longer speak it fluently, you would pick up the language more easily now than if you were learning it for the first time.

I think technology can absolutely be a boon for distributed practice. Classroom instruction has traditionally adhered to a linear or modular structure—one topic is covered at a time, followed by massed practice homework assignments are usually related to the most recently introduced topic.

After a unit exam, the topic is often never brought up again. Even if teachers are aware and convinced of the benefits of distributed practice, it is easy to see why it might be inconvenient or difficult for them to deviate from the usual approach. Teachers are constrained by limited class time, and it might take a seemingly excessive amount of planning to organize the topics so they recur in a distributed fashion. But this is where technology can play a very helpful role.

When I was an undergraduate many years ago, the teacher I had for most of my courses had studied under Benton Underwood at Northwestern University. She said that his research showed that massed learning is best for retention in learning meaningful material and distributed learning is best only for learning nonsense syllables.

This supports a view that is the opposite of what us professors tend to believe: that distributed practice is best for studying classroom materials. Not according to her reading of Underwood. So, what gives? Hi Russell, thanks for the comment! Are you of the mind that she was wrong? From my understanding, Underwood and colleagues would actually argue that distributed practice works exceptionally well in retention, and much better than massed practice e.

I think the disconnect there could be the time period that your professor worked with Underwood or a conflation of the materials used in early studies and the generalizing of the effects to material beyond nonsense syllables in later studies. There is no research today that would suggest massed practice is better for retention than distributed practice. The evidence is overwhelming in this case, as you so rightly point out. Yes all the research points to distributed practice being the more superior way of learning and encoding into long term memory.

Most people cram at the end of learning, their motivation is to memorize and regurgitate knowledge for the purposes of passing an exam the next day. The pressure is there to do it. I wonder though if cramming as a strategy can be utilized though for accelerated learning at the very start of learning instead of the end. Then being relaxed with learning more in detail in the time after. Could doing it this way have an effect on learning? Thanks, Al, for your response to this post.

You have an interesting idea by linking studying to motivation—that surely is the case. Motivation to study or learn will impact how much information gets in, regardless of whether it is spaced or mass practice.

Motivation leads to focus, and focus and elaboration lead to better memory. Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Skip to content By Ashley Shookman Does the following image look like a snapshot of you trying to study for a test the night before it is to occur?

References Bloom, K. Just an idea. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Previous Post Previous Because who reads. Loading Comments