What Is Spacing In Teaching?

by | Last updated on January 24, 2024

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Spacing is a powerful strategy that boosts learning by spreading lessons and retrieval opportunities out over time so learning is not crammed all at once. By returning to content every so often, students’ knowledge has had time to rest and be refreshed.

What is spacing in learning strategies?

What is spaced practice? Spaced practice is the exact opposite of cramming . When you cram, you study for a long, intense period of time close to an exam. When you space your learning, you take that same amount of study time, and spread it out across a much longer period of time.

What is spaced practice in teaching?

Spaced practice or distributed practice is the idea that practising a particular skill or retrieving particular information is more effective when spread over time , rather than repeated sequentially over a short time period.

What is interleaving and spacing?

‘Spacing’ refers to revision throughout the course of study, while ‘interleaving’ means switching between ideas while you learn . Both techniques can help boost students’ long-term memories and retrieval of key information.

What is retrieval and spaced practice?

Spaced practice spreads lessons and retrieval opportunities out over time . “When practice is distributed or spaced, a given amount of practice is divided across multiple sessions and not massed into one session.” ... Most importantly, your retrieval practice exercises are low stakes – they are not graded.

What are the three steps of using spaced practice?

  1. Plan short and frequent review sessions.
  2. Review over an extended period of time.
  3. Review older material first.
  4. Incorporate old material with new information.
  5. Create summaries and checklists.

What is an example of spacing effect?

For example, the spacing effect indicates that for a customer to remember an advertisement better , it would be recommended for the advertisement to be spaced out and not play the same commercial back-to-back on the television, or in other forms of media.

How does spacing effect work?

The spacing effect demonstrates that learning is more effective when study sessions are spaced out . This effect shows that more information is encoded into long-term memory by spaced study sessions, also known as spaced repetition or spaced presentation, than by massed presentation (“cramming”).

How do you do spacing effect?

This is where the spacing effect comes in. It’s a wildly useful phenomenon: we are better able to recall information and concepts if we learn them in multiple, spread-out sessions. We can leverage this effect by using spaced repetition to slowly learn almost anything. It works for words, numbers, images, and skills.

Why is spaced learning effective?

Spaced repetition is a more effective technique for learning because it is in sync with the manner our brains function . Researchers have proven that the brain is not well adapted to storing lots of new information in short periods of times.

What are interleaving techniques?

Interleaved practice – when you are learning two or more related concepts or skills , instead of focusing exclusively on one concept or skill at a time, it can be helpful to alternate between them (for example, if you are learning topic A and topic B, rather than practice only A on one day and only B on the next, you ...

What are the six learning strategies?

From this work, specific recommendations can be made for students to maximize their learning efficiency. Specifically, six key learning strategies from cognitive research can be applied to education: spaced practice, interleaving, elaborative interrogation, concrete examples, dual coding, and retrieval practice.

What is interweaving in teaching?

Interleaving is a process where students mix, or interleave, multiple subjects or topics while they study in order to improve their learning . Blocked practice, on the other hand, involves studying one topic very thoroughly before moving to another topic.

How do you implement spaced practice?

Do: space out your learning over time.

By “spacing” learning activities out over time (for example, 1 to 2 hours every other day , or at least once per week, rather than a 12-hour marathon cramming session), you will be able to learn more information and retain it longer.

How students can use spacing and retrieval practice?

Students may not use spaced practice on their own .

Students often opt to study information by cramming a couple of days before the exam. To encourage spaced studying, teachers can provide review activities (e.g., retrieval practice and brief quizzes) or assignments on a daily or weekly basis.

How do you space a study session?

Space Your Study Sessions

Decades of research have demonstrated that spacing out study sessions over a longer period of time improves long-term memory. In other words, if you have 12 hours to spend on a subject, it’s better to study it for three hours each week for four weeks than to cram all 12 hours into week four.

Juan Martinez
Author
Juan Martinez
Juan Martinez is a journalism professor and experienced writer. With a passion for communication and education, Juan has taught students from all over the world. He is an expert in language and writing, and has written for various blogs and magazines.