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).

Share This Post: