Spaced vs. mass practice
Overview
- Influence: Spaced vs. mass practice
- Domain: Student Learning Strategies
- Sub-Domain: Learning strategies
- Potential to Accelerate Student Achievement: Potential to considerably accelerate
- Influence Definition: The claim is that students are better able to commit information to memory when they study that information in spaced (or distributed) intervals rather than all at once in a "massed" interval. Spaced practices involve practice broken up into a number of shorter sessions, over a longer period of time. Massed practice consists of fewer, longer training sessions. Ebbinghaus's Forgetting Curve displays the pattern of the number of spaced practices increase, so does the amount of information retained each time.
Evidence
- Number of meta-analyses: 5
- Number of studies: 510
- Number of students: 167,763
- Number of effects: 1,115
- Weighted mean effect size: 0.59
- Robustness index: 4
Meta-Analyses
| Journal Title | Author | First Author's Country | Article Name | Year Published | Variable | Number of Studies | Number of Students | Number of Effects | Effect Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Research quarterly for exercise and sport | Lee & Genovese | USA | Distribution of practice in motor skill acquisition: Learning and performance effects reconsidered | 1988 | Spaced vs. massed practice | 52 | 0 | 52 | 0.96 |
| Journal of Applied Psychology | Donovan & Radosevich | USA | A meta-analytic review of the distribution of practice effect: Now you see it, now you don't | 1999 | Spaced vs. massed practice | 63 | 0 | 112 | 0.46 |
| Journal of Consumer Research | Janiszewski, Noel & Sawyer | USA | A meta-analysis of the spacing effect in verbal learning: Implications for research on advertising repetition and consumer memory | 2003 | Spaced vs. massed practice | 61 | 0 | 484 | 0.72 |
| Nature: Science of Learning | Hattie & Donoghue | Australia | Learning strategies: A synthesis and conceptual model. | 2016 | Distributed practice | 150 | 152,952 | 150 | 0.85 |
| Psychological bulletin | Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer | USA | Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. | 2009 | Spaced vs. massed practice | 184 | 14,811 | 317 | 0.27 |
| TOTAL/AVERAGE | 510 | 167,763 | 1,115 | 0.65 | |||||