Distributed and massed practice: from laboratory to classroom

Abstract

The benefit to memory of spacing presentations of material is well established but lacks an adequate explanation and is rarely applied in education. This paper presents three experiments that examined the spacing effect and its application to education. Experiment 1 demonstrated that spacing repeated presentations of items is equally beneficial to memory for a wide range of ages, contrary to some theories. Experiment 2 introduced 'clustered' presentations as a more relevant control than massed, reflecting the fact that massed presentation of material is uncommon in education. The scheduling of clustered presentations was intermediate between massed and distributed, yet recall was no different than for massed. Experiment 3, a classroom-based study, demonstrated the benefit of distributed over clustered teaching of reading through modification of the scheduling of everyday lessons. Thus, the effectiveness of teaching may be improved by increasing the degree to which lessons are distributed.The benefit for memory of distributed (over massed) presentation of to-be-remembered material is robust. Spaced presentation of material leads to better retentions than does blocked presentation. However the principle of distributing learning has not been widely applied in education. Dempster (1988) argued that a major factor limiting such application is the lack of direct classroom-relevant demonstrations of its efficacy. Indeed, it is questionable whether or not the contrast between distributed and massed presentation of material is relevant to education at all. Massed presentation, in the sense of repeated presentations of to-be-learnt stimuli, or more generally, concentrated teaching of a topic in a single session, is rarely found in the classroom. Of more interest is the question of whether different degrees of distribution are influential in learning. The experiments reported in this paper begin to address the need to bridge laboratory studies (Experiments 1 and 2) and classroom-based studies (Experiment 3). At the same time a more important comparison than between massed and distributed presentation is investigated, namely between different degrees of distribution.

The effect of distributed practice on students’ conceptual understanding of statistics

“…the spacing effects, were found in research that at first predominantly was done in the laboratory and usually was focused at memorising lists of items with intervals in terms of minutes or hours (Glenberg 1979;Melton 1970). In subsequent work the positive effect of distributed practice was also established in authentic educational settings (Seabrook et al 2005) and much longer time intervals (Bahrick and Hall 2005;Bahrick and Phelps 1987). Bahrick and Hall explain the spacing effect with students' metacognitive monitoring.…”

“…This reduced considerably both the spacing of these educational activities and the opportunity to spread self-study. Both the shorter intervals between educational activities and the reduced distribution of self-study led to more massed practice, or what Seabrook et al (2005) have called clustered presentations of subject matter. Massed practice is defined as studying subject matter uninterruptedly or with only short breaks, in a brief time interval (e.g., Bahrick and Hall 2005).…”

Practice for Second Language Learning: Don’t Throw out the Baby with the Bathwater

“…It has often been documented in educational psychology that distributing a given amount of practice over larger stretches of time is beneficial (see e.g. Seabrook, Brown, & Solity, 2005), but Collins, Halter, Lightbown, and Spada (1999) and Serrano (in press) show that there are limits to how far this distribution can go, in the sense that spread over a couple of years may be worse than spread over a couple of months, or even spread over a year worse than spread over a semester.…”

Distributed Revisiting: an Analytic for Retention of Coherent Science Learning

“…These findings held for repetition and induction tasks (Kornell, Castel, Eich, & Bjork, 2010) and abstraction and generalization tasks (West, 2011). Classroom studies and studies with educationally relevant materials have recently become more common, finding benefits to distributed study of scientific prose (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006), maps (Carpenter & Pashler, 2007), history facts (Carpenter, Pashler, & Cepeda, 2009), vocabulary (Bloom & Shuell, 1981Seabrook, Brown, & Solity, 2005;Sobel, Cepeda, & Kapler, 2010), multiplication facts (Rea & Modigliani, 1985), statistics concepts (Budé, Imbos, Wiel, & Berger, 2011;Smith & Rothkopf, 1984), middle school biology concepts (Reynolds & Glaser, 1964), university medical education (Kerfoot, Kearney, Connelly, & Ritchey, 2009), and elementary science (Vlach & Sandhofer, 2012).…”