You know how around the middle of a lesson, kids in a classroom start talking, passing notes, shooting spitballs, and the like? It’s totally natural – the conscious mind needs to relax and play, while the subconscious mind assimilates the new concepts and connects them to the older ones in memory.
This is why every educator needs to let students take periodic breaks.
This not only goes for school, but seminars and workshops as well, especially if you’re attempting to create change by imparting new concepts you want your audience to adopt in place of something else…
and guess what – it also works for music, writing, athletics – almost any other skill you want to improve upon.
In a report by Work-Learning Research, Inc. entitled: Spacing Learning Events Over Time: What the Research Says, author Will Thalheimer, PhD reviews the literature regarding the effect of spacing and spaced repetition on learning.
The key findings of the study are:
- Repetitions—if well designed—are very effective in supporting learning.
- Spaced repetitions are generally more effective than non-spaced repetitions.
- Both presentations of learning material and retrieval practice opportunities produce benefits when utilized as spaced repetitions.
- Spacing is particularly beneficial if long-term retention is the goal—as is true of most training situations. Spacing helps minimize forgetting.
- Wider spacings are generally more effective than narrower spacings, although there may be a point where spacings that are too wide are counterproductive. A good heuristic is to aim for having the length of the spacing interval be equal to the retention interval.
- Spacing repetitions over time can hurt retrieval during learning events while it generates better remembering in the future (after the learning events).
- Gradually expanding the length of spacings can create benefits, but these benefits generally do not outperform consistent spacing intervals.
- One way to utilize spacing is to change the definition of a learning event to include the connotation that learning takes place over time—real learning doesn’t usually occur in one-time events.
The last finding in particular is something chief learning officers of organizations often struggle with when planning continuing education and training programs for their workforce, especially in a world driven by intensive workshops, seminars, and “boot camps.”
The following chart from Thalheimer’s report illustrates the need to integrate spaced learning both during and after events.
The full text of the report can be found at:
http://willthalheimer.typepad.com/files/spacing_learning_over_time_2006.pdf
Related papers include:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399982/
https://www.td.org/insights/spaced-learning-an-approach-to-minimize-the-forgetting-curve