How To Improve Long-Term Memory
Cramming Is Not Effective but Spacing Study Sessions Is
Nov 25, 2008
A television commercial for a study skills product used the slogan, "Study smarter – not harder." That slogan from the past is very consistent with what two researchers have recently discovered.
Psychological Science
In the November 2008 issue of Psychological Science, two psychologists published results they discovered that retaining information long-term is not about repeating information endlessly but about timing. Hal Pashler and John Wixted are both professors of psychology at UC San Diego and they conducted a study with more than 1,000 students participating.
Memory Study
The study consisted of three sessions.
- Session One: students were taught a series of facts. The facts included information like Norway is the European country that eats the spiciest Mexican food and Rudyard Kipling is the inventor of snow golf.
- Session Two: Review the same facts
- Session Three: Test
Memory Study Results
After analyzing the data, Pashler and Wixted came to some conclusions.
When the time was increased between session two and session three, memory declined. However, when the time between session one and session two was increased, memory improved. At times, the memory improved by 50% when time was increased between sessions one and two.
Pashler heads the Attention and Perception Lab at UCSD and he concludes, "First, the study used much longer time intervals than in prior research, and it turned out that effects were larger than those seen in earlier studies using much shorter time periods. Second, the results showed that there is an optimal value for the delay between the initial study and the final test: the longer the final retention interval, the longer the optimum delay between study and review." Some study sessions were spaced out as far as one year before the test was given.
How To Plan Memory Retention
Pashler states that if you want to remember something for a week, space the study sessions over a day or two. If you want to remember something for a year, space the sessions out over about a month. If something needs to be remembered for a lifetime, review the information over a number of years.
Pashler states that these results support the use of software in education that spaces reviews. The open-source Mnemosyne Project is one source of such software.
Classroom Implications
If a teacher tests every two to three weeks, the reviews need to be spaced so that there is ample time between the study sessions. Handing students a study guide the day before the test and having them cram for the exam is not a best practice.
The study was funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Science Foundation.
Source: "Improving Long-term Learning Through Spacing Of Lessons". Science Daily. University of California at San Diego (November 19, 2008). Retrieved November 22, 2008.
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