ScienceDaily: Back To School: Cramming Doesn't Work In The Long Term - The Diigo Meta page

• 03 Sep 07
  

  Aaron Lanou

  learning education memory articles

• 02 Sep 07
  

  Wisely

  brain education learning schools

  • as reported in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, "massing" all the study on a single topic into a single session reduces long-term retention. It's better to leave it alone for a while and then return to it.
  • When two study sessions were separated by breaks ranging from five minutes to six months, with a final test given six months later, students did much better if their break lasted at least a month. So, rather than distribute their study of some material across just a few days, as millions of school children do when given a different list of vocabulary or spelling words each week, students would be better off seeing the same words throughout the school year.
  • Rohrer and Pashler have also found similar effects with more abstract learning, like math. This is particularly troubling, the psychologists say, because most mathematics textbooks today are organized to encourage both overlearning and massing. So students end up working 20 problems on the same concept (which they learned earlier that day) when they should be working 20 problems drawn from different lessons learned since the beginning of the school year. In brief, students are wasting a lot of precious learning time.

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