The 60-second card
The finding
The same amount of practice, spread over days and weeks, is remembered far longer than practice crammed into one session.
Do this
Return to old material on a schedule: next day, next week, next month. Build it into warm-ups, homework, and unit reviews.
Best evidence
A review of 317 experiments found spacing helps, and the longer you need to remember something, the longer the gaps between practice should be (Cepeda et al. 2006(opens in a new tab)).
317 experiments
the longer you need to remember, the longer the gaps
The 5-minute brief
Why it works
When practice comes after some forgetting has started, retrieving it takes more effort, and that effort makes the memory stronger. Massed practice feels better in the moment because everything is fresh, which is why students and teachers both underrate spacing. A study from Rohrer's team found students underestimate the value of spacing and mixing when they schedule their own math practice (IES project page(opens in a new tab)).
What it looks like
| Grade band | In practice |
|---|---|
| K–2 | Letter sounds and math facts from earlier months stay in the daily warm-up all year. |
| 3–5 | Homework is half today's skill and half review from earlier units. |
| 6–8 | Each unit test includes some questions from earlier units. |
| 9–12 | A cumulative final is announced on day one; weekly quizzes keep pulling in old units. |
Common mistakes
- Teaching a unit, testing it, and never returning to it.
- Homework that is 20 copies of today's problem type. That is massed practice.
- Reviewing only the week before the state test. That is cramming.
What a leader looks for in 5 minutes
- Does warm-up or homework include material from weeks or months ago?
- Do unit tests include questions from earlier units?
What we don't know yet
The best exact gaps for school learning are not settled. The lab rule of thumb is that longer retention needs longer gaps, but how that maps onto a school calendar is still being studied.
Go deeper
- Researcher
- Doug Rohrer; Hal Pashler; Nicholas Cepeda
- Translator
- Carl Hendrick; the Learning Scientists
Also called: spacing, distributed practice, spaced repetition
Grades and subjects
Sources
- Rohrer et al. 2020 (IES) (opens in a new tab)
ies.ed.gov
- Cepeda et al. 2006, spacing (opens in a new tab)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov