The Power of Spaced Learning: Effective Strategies

"Supertutor” Mark Maclaine is Superprof's Co-founder and Director of Learning. Mark is currently working on his new book, which is based on a series of real-life clients and the experiences he has gained over his many years of tutoring. This series looks at ‘Maintaining your memory banks’ and this chapter looks at ‘Spacing Learning'.

What is spaced learning?

Traditionally, we’ve been taught that the best and most efficient way to learn something is non-stop repetition and there’s good reason to believe that; after all, it's certainly quite effective when it comes to preparing for exams, which is what we’ve been using as a measure of understanding for hundreds of years. However, research in recent years tells a different story however, and if you haven’t yet, I recommend you take a look at the other articles about how the brain learns since that plays a key role in what you’re about to read. It’s come to light that cramming information into our heads in quick succession might not be as effective at creating long-term understanding as we might think. Students are used to needing to store a lot of information in their short-term memory in order to score well in their tests, but the memory they use is exactly as it’s named, “short term”. That is to say that once the exam or test has come and gone, they are likely to forget the information they learned because they only needed to call upon it in one instance. This is where the idea of spaced learning comes to save the day. Instead of cramming, spaced study suggests that we should instead learn in short but frequent bursts, taking a break in between. The key to this method is increasing the length of intervals between each repetition. Spaced learning as a learning theory suggests that excess is far inferior to controlled and organised learning and that our brain needs time to consolidate our learning. In some ways, it’s the same as saying “quality over quantity” when it comes to education, just as in everything else. I think a nice way of thinking about it is that when we’re learning, it’s not ultimately to meet a quota or to please someone else; we’re usually doing it for ourselves, for our own development and benefit. In this sense, there’s no point in half-trying and, just the same way, there’s no point in doing work that isn’t useful to us. This is why we should instead focus on how to make the work that we’re doing more impactful and educationally nutritious since at the end of it, we are the beneficiaries.

Why intervals matter

Intervals are key to making spaced study work because our ultimate goal in learning should be to store the information in our long-term memory rather than our short-term memory. A good way to think about this is to think about the effort involved on behalf of our brain. Our brain much prefers to rely on connections and information stored in our memory, instead of figuring things out manually every time we face a challenge or problem. Having information in our memory saves our brain the trouble of making new connections, which is very demanding. Increasing the interval between each recollection without forgetting it affirms its importance in the brain, which will therefore store it in the long-term memory to avoid needing to re-learn it again and again. Do this enough times and the information will earn its place as a (nearly) permanent resident in our memory, like the foundational things we did as a child, riding a bike being the most linguistically common example of something we don’t forget, regardless of whether we do it often or not.

There’s another reason why intervals are key to effective learning, and it’s to do with our stamina as students. Unlike when using generative learning techniques, we tend to lose interest or focus on a subject at one point or another, especially if we’ve been studying it at length. Work we do in this state of fatigue and disinterest is noticeable; in written work, for example, our handwriting becomes messier, our adjectives less vibrant, less descriptive and our vocabulary less specific. Spacing learning using a spacing study method instead of a massed practice method helps to combat this effect by ensuring that whenever we are working, we are paying our full attention and entering the new or revised information into a fresh and fresh and willing brain. As I stated before, everyone is different, but I think we can all tell when we enter work fatigue, lose enthusiasm and start to get distracted. The secret, according to the spaced learning technique, is counterintuitively to give in to this feeling, but not with the intention of giving up, but instead jumping back in after giving ourselves an appropriate break. This is where discipline and motivation are one and the same, and can work together to make us even more effective learners.

What can we do as tutors?

As tutors, there are ways we can use this information to better plan our lessons, curriculums and homework. Since we know that we want our students to be spacing out their learning and working when they feel the most mentally fresh and attentive, we need to plan out our material accordingly. It starts in planning our delivery of the curriculum/syllabus we’re teaching. Curriculums are usually defined by administrative bodies outside of our control, but the way we deliver them is often up to us. This means that we can space out our material such that our students will have to recall each topic at increasingly long intervals, we can do this by giving refreshers, or by combining two topics such that knowledge from a previous topic is needed to solve a problem in the new one. A well-designed plan, using spaced study, sees students needing to cram their revision before a test as little as possible, by doing the spacing for them.

When using the philosophy of spaced learning to set homework, we can try to be mindful of our students' attention span and set tasks that can be completed in one burst, or at least broken down into several bursts with breaks in between. Even from a premeditative perspective, a student is far less likely to procrastinate work that they know they can complete in less time, which means that setting more shorter tasks can increase a student's capacity for homework overall, resulting in not only a higher quality of completed work but also a higher volume in the end. It might seem counterintuitive, but when you think about it, it starts to make a lot of sense.

In revision itself, we can accelerate the commitment of information to long-term memory by presenting the same idea in unique and novel ways. The more connections we have in our brains via neural pathways, the easier it is to recall the associated information; not only that but having more unique pathways solidifies the importance of the knowledge in our memory, such that we are far less likely to forget it.  For an analogy, we can think of cities; the bigger and more significant they are, the more roads they require leading into them, and learning can work in much the same way.

Finally, there’s another excellent way to use spaced learning to prepare our students for tests; funnily enough, it’s more tests. Regularly putting students through topic-specific tests will not only prepare them for the real deal through experience, but it will force them to recall the information they are learning regularly, thus strengthening their memory and neural pathways. Additionally, by regularly testing and scoring work from our students, we can quickly and easily identify the areas that they are struggling in, something that can be particularly difficult in teaching a larger group or when teaching lots of different material to different students, such that learning outcomes might look different for each of them. While students might not like to do badly in the smaller tests, they would certainly prefer to fail there, rather than the final examination.

What next?

Whether you are a new or already experienced tutor, or even a student reading these articles to bolster your own learning efficiency, I recommend looking back and comparing your current work with the spaced learning method we just explored, looking for any ways in which you could change or augment your teaching or learning plan to take advantage of this psychological gnosis. There is of course much more to learn about different learning methods and the psychology of learning, and much of it is right here on the Superprof blog. Make sure that you check out our other articles in the “advice for tutors” series of articles, or, if you’re in the mood for something different, check out our other series of articles where we explore a huge range of topics, through the lens of introduction, and education. In any case, we hope to see you again soon.