This important strategy should help improve your learning efficiency and memory. It’s presented in college student context, but of course applies to anyone looking for a good study tip.

Imagine that a psychology lecture has just let out. The vast majority of students will wait several weeks to review their lecture notes. Unfortunately, when they do so, very little of what they’ve written will make sense. The notes will be difficult to follow, and the content hard to understand. They might as well be seeing the material for the first time. Why? The answer is simple: Their memory of the material has long since decayed.

Why does forgetting happen?

Most students incorrectly believe that after learning new information, they steadily forget a little bit each and every day that passes.

This is a myth. Actually, newly learned information has a relatively short half-life in your brain. This fact is demonstrated very nicely by the forgetting curve.

The forgetting curve is not a new phenomenon. German psychologists (e.g., Herman Ebbinghaus) were plotting these curves 150 years ago. Since that time, a great deal of accumulated data has supported their validity. Take a look at the forgetting curve shown here:

The peak of the curve (T) represents your memory for material immediately after the learning session—let’s say the end of a lecture. Now, we can conclude 2 things from the curve: The Obvious and the Not-so-Obvious.

The Obvious:

We can see it makes no sense to wait until midterms or final exams to do your first review (that is, to wait until Day 30 or longer on the above graph). By that time, you’ll have forgotten more than 95 percent of the material. You’ll feel as if you’re encountering the information in your notes for the first time, and what should take you only 4 minutes to review will now take you 40 minutes. The notes will look foreign because you won’t remember anything.

Not-so-Obvious:

However, there’s a more important conclusion we can reach from the curve: You don’t have to wait several weeks for this degree of forgetting to occur. Massive forgetting actually happens within hours of the initial learning session. Therefore, even those students who wait several days to review the material are in trouble! If you look carefully at the graph, you can see that even before Day 2 arrives, you will already have forgotten 40–70 percent of what you learned!

The crucial point is this: Make sure to review new material within hours of any initial learning episode.

The vast majority of students could save dozens of hours of study time per semester by using this one technique alone to markedly improve learning efficiency and memory.

Notice how a small investment up front pays huge dividends come exam time.

It is also worth noting that these recommendations apply not only to lectures, but to any academic learning—whether from a textbook, video, or computer learning session.

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You’ve decided you’ve got four hours this weekend to review for your psychology exam. Is it better to do it all in one 4-hour session, or divide it up into four separate 1-hour sessions? The first strategy is referred to as massed practice, and the second is referred to as distributed practice.

It turns out overwhelming evidence supports the distributed practice strategy as the better of the two.

How much of a difference can distributed practice make? Let’s say you had a list of 100 vocabulary words to learn for your foreign language class. If your test was tomorrow, it might take you 50 times to study the list so that you know the words perfectly. However, if your test was 3 days from now, and you distributed your practice over 3 days, it might take you only 28 times to study the list to know the words perfectly. In other words, you’d be able to cut study time nearly in half with the same results.

Sound too good to be true? These are the same kind of results a famous German scientist (Ebbinghaus) got when he did some of the first distributed practice experiments back in 1885.

Since then, a considerable amount of research has accumulated demonstrating the wide applicability and power of this technique. For example, distributed practice has shown to greatly benefit the learning of diverse types of information, tasks, and skills, such as:

• Foreign languages
• Science
• History
• Mathematics (from the elementary to the college level)
• Games
• And even motor skills, including sports, playing musical instruments, dance, and so on.

One scientific paper [Reference below] reviewed dozens of other published research studies involving distributed practice. This meta-analysis found the effect size for distributed practice to be huge. To put the statistics into perspective, the average person getting distributed training remembered better than about 67 percent of the people getting massed training.

Since most of us do not distribute our studying over multiple sessions, this tip represents an important way many can accelerate learning and improve memory. Accelerated learning and memory are worth much more than just getting your through exams. Better memory will help you out in just about every aspect of your life from household errands to playing the best hand in a poker game.

Reference: Donovan JJ, Radosevich DR. A meta-analytic review of the distribution of practice effect: Now you see it, now you don’t. Journal of Applied Psychology. 1999;84(795-805).

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