The spacing effect: A case study in the failure to apply the results of psychological research.

Dempster, Frank N.

doi:10.1037/0003-066x.43.8.627

Cited by 363 publications

(291 citation statements)

References 59 publications

(110 reference statements)

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“…Additionally, Kornell and Bjork's results have been replicated by Kang and Pashler (2012), Zulkiply and Burt (in press), and Wahlheim, Dunlosky, and Jacoby (2011). All of these findings seem to fit within an extensive literature on the spacing effect-that is, the finding that items studied once and restudied after a delay are recalled better in the long term than are items studied and restudied in quick succession (for reviews, see Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006;Dempster, 1988;Glenberg, 1979). In all of the recent studies demonstrating the benefits of spacing for inductive learning (with the exception of Vlach et al, 2008, who did not have an interleaved condition in addition to their spaced condition), however, interleavingmixing exemplars from different categories together-was what enhanced learning, rather than temporal spacing per se-a point to which we will return shortly.…”

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confidence: 53%

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

et al. 2012

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Kornell and Bjork (Psychological Science 19:585-592, 2008) found that interleaving exemplars of different categories enhanced inductive learning of the concepts based on those exemplars. They hypothesized that the benefit of mixing exemplars from different categories is that doing so highlights differences between the categories. Kang and Pashler (Applied Cognitive Psychology 26:97-103, 2012) obtained results consistent with this discriminative-contrast hypothesis: Interleaving enhanced inductive learning, but temporal spacing, which does not highlight category differences, did not. We further tested the discriminative-contrast hypothesis by examining the effects of interleaving and spacing, as well as their combined effects. In three experiments, using photographs of butterflies and birds as the stimuli, temporal spacing was harmful when it interrupted the juxtaposition of interleaved categories, even when total spacing was held constant, supporting the discriminative-contrast hypothesis. Temporal spacing also had value, however, when it did not interrupt discrimination processing.Keywords Categorization . Induction . Interleaving . Spacing . MetacognitionPeople accumulate a great deal of knowledge via inductive learning. Children, for example, learn concepts such as boat or fruit by being exposed to exemplars of those categories and inducing the commonalities that define the concepts.Later in life, we might learn to distinguish between different species of butterflies or birds, as in the present research. Such inductive learning is critical in making sense of events, objects, and actions-and, more generally, in structuring and understanding our world. In the present research, we examined how exemplars of to-be-learned categories should be sequenced and spaced in order to optimize inductive learning. Kornell and Bjork (2008) investigated the effect of study schedules on inductive learning-specifically, learning artists' painting styles from exemplars of their paintings. Images of six paintings by each of 12 artists were presented for study, with the artist's name displayed below each painting. The paintings by half of the artists were blocked (i.e., all six paintings by a given artist were shown consecutively), whereas the paintings by the other six artists were interleaved (i.e., mixed together). After the learning phase, participants were shown new paintings by each of the 12 artists and were asked to identify which artist had painted each new painting. Kornell and Bjork found that interleaving artists' paintings led to better performance on this inductive task than did blocking-even though participants consistently believed that blocking, rather than interleaving, had been more helpful for learning the artists' styles.

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confidence: 53%

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

et al. 2012

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“…Spaced practice has often been advocated as a way to optimize learning. A host of experiments have promoted this conclusion (e.g., Dempster, 1988;Reder & Anderson, 1982), and it has been obtained in many paradigms using many populations and, indeed, species. We do not challenge the conclusion that spaced practice is best when the information uptake on the first presentation is complete-that is, when little or no further learning would be obtained by continued immediate perseverance.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Dynamics of Learning and Allocation of Study Time to a Region of Proximal Learning.

Metcalfe¹,

Kornell²

2003

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

167

162

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In contrast to the dominant discrepancy reduction model, which favors the most difficult items, people, given free choice, devoted most time to medium-difficulty items and studied the easiest items first. When study time was experimentally manipulated, best performance resulted when most time was given to the medium-difficulty items. Empirically determined information uptake functions revealed steep initial learning for easy items with little subsequent increase. For medium-difficulty items, initial gains were smaller but more sustained, suggesting that the strategy people had used, when given free choice, was largely appropriate. On the basis of the information uptake functions, a negative spacing effect was predicted and observed in the final experiment. Overall, the results favored the region of proximal learning framework.

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“…Despite such potential for bolstering learning, the spacing effect has suffered a history of slow translation into standard educational practices (Dempster, 1988). In an effort to accelerate integration in practice, studies have appeared in recent years of real-world classroom demonstrations of the spacing effect in many contexts, such as vocabulary learning (Bird, 2010;Carpenter, Pashler, & Cepeda, 2009;Gallo & Odu, 2009;Kang, Lindsey, Mozer, & Pashler, 2014;Khajah, Lindsey, & Mozer, 2014;Lindsey, Shroyer, Pashler, & Mozer, 2014;Rohrer, 2009;Rohrer & Taylor, 2006;Sobel, Cepeda, & Kapler, 2011), fraction learning (Rau, Aleven, Rummel, & Pardos, 2014), and skill acquisition (Moulton et al, 2006;Stafford & Dewar, 2014).…”

Section: What Is the Spacing Effect?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Time-on-Task: The Relationship Between Spaced Study and Certification in MOOCs

Miyamoto

Coleman²,

Williams

et al. 2015

Learning Analytics

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A long history of laboratory and field experiments have demonstrated that dividing study time into many sessions is often superior to massing study time into few sessions, a phenomenon known as the "spacing effect." We use this well-established finding from the psychology literature as inspiration for investigating how students distribute their study sessions across an entire Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Drawing on observational tracking log data from 20 HarvardX courses, we examine the relationship between students' allocation of their time in MOOCs and their performance. While controlling for the effect of total time, we show that the number of sessions students initiate is correlated with certification rate, across students in all courses. A one-unit change in session count is positively associated with an estimated 3.4% change in certification odds. When individual students spend similar amounts of time in multiple courses, they perform better in courses where that time is distributed among more sessions, suggesting that the benefit of spacing MOOC study sessions is independent of student characteristics. Our study demonstrates that well-established learning theories can be combined with massive new datasets and innovative approaches to learning analytics to advance our understanding of student practice and learning.

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The spacing effect: A case study in the failure to apply the results of psychological research.

Cited by 363 publications

References 59 publications

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

The Dynamics of Learning and Allocation of Study Time to a Region of Proximal Learning.

Beyond Time-on-Task: The Relationship Between Spaced Study and Certification in MOOCs

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