Spaced Practice
Overview
Spaced practice is a learning strategy that deliberately spaces out learning or study sessions over varying periods of time, with the purpose of increasing retention, understanding, and long-term knowledge acquisition. Often called ‘distributed learning' or ‘distributed practice', this spacing effect can benefit learning across content areas, and can support studying practices as well as other forms of learning. Providing repeated practice opportunities that are spaced apart in time is more effective than the same number of practice opportunities closer together in time. The mental breaks between learning sessions may support students' Attention and create opportunities for memories to better consolidate into memory, while increasing the number of repetitions across different time points or contexts can create more memory cues, supporting encoding and retrieval from Long-term Memory. The time between learning sessions should be long enough to make retrieval effortful but not so long as to make retrieval unsuccessful, and can vary between seconds to months depending on content and context. Immediate repetition of information can lead to the “illusion of knowing,” in which new learning may feel familiar, but is in fact quickly forgotten, likely because it was held in Working or Short-term Memory. Spaced practice is particularly effective with deeper learning, rather than more superficial learning, and when paired with retrieval practice.
Example: Use This Strategy In in the Classroom
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Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Instructional Approaches Strategies
Flipped learning is when the delivery of traditional content (i.e., lectures, videos) occurs outside of the classroom, allowing class time to be used for more active and application-based activities.
Multimodal teaching and learning provide opportunities for students to engage with the same content through different sensory modalities, such as visual, auditory and tactile.
Retrieval practice requires students to access information, or get information “out” from Long-term memory in order to support better retention and understanding.
A strengths-based approach is one where educators intentionally identify, communicate, and harness students' assets, across many aspects of the whole learner, in order to empower them to flourish.
Incorporating think-alouds, or verbalizing thinking while reading or working through a new concept, can be a powerful way to help learners explore disciplinary texts, learn new skills, and retain content.
