Streamline Training & Documentation: The Spacing Effect

Friday, April 18, 2008

The Spacing Effect

The spacing effect is a well-established learning principle stating that material a person studies (factual material, in particular) is more fully retained when study sessions are spaced over time rather than being crammed into a brief period.

For guidance on what determines optimal spacing of study sessions, you can turn to research reported by the Optimal Learning Lab of Carnegie Mellon University. Lab researchers have developed an algorithm that estimates optimal spacing by looking at:

When prior practice occurred

How many prior practices have occurred

What the spacing between prior practices was

Whether prior practice occurred as testing or passive study

Duration of prior practices

An individual's history of success or failure with tests

What type of practice occurs (e.g., phonological, orthographic, English to foreign language, or foreign language to English)

You can read a paper on the Optimal Learning Lab's FaCT (Fact and Concept Training) System here (pdf).

Note: This post is a follow-on to an earlier post on the learning curve concept.

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Labels: Cognition, Learning resources

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