Study Smart: The Power Of Spaced Repetition

By Brooke Thio / In School/Academic / 08/10/2012 at 12:33 PM /

Did you get your child to complete stacks of assessment books way before the final examinations started,
only to find that they still got mediocre grades? It’s true that cramming at the last minute doesn’t help exam
scores, but revising in advance without the proper technique is also a clear sign of “studying hard” without
“studying smart”. So how do you get your child (or even yourself) to study smart?

One of the best ways to learn and study effectively is to use spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is a
learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously
learned material, so that it becomes retained in long-term memory. In this article you’ll learn how spaced
repetition works, how you can adopt it for your child’s revision, and get some software and tools that utilise
spaced repetition for learning.

How Does Spaced Repetition Work?

While repetition is essential for remembering what one has learned, the amount of information that the
human brain can absorb falls quickly over time. This is known in psychology as the EbbinghausForgetting
Curve:

The reason why our learning efficiency falls so quickly is because the brain needs to process what it has
learned. By piling on too much information at one go, the brain’s working memory cannot effectively process
everything. However, researchers discovered that if newly learned concepts were revised at specific
intervals of time, the information would be most effectively retained in long-term memory. As shown in the
Forgetting Curve above, these revision intervals occur at 10 minutes, 1 day, 1 week, and 1 month.