steady

Memory and learning · Learning it

Space it, don't cram it

A new name or fact: recall it once in an hour, once tomorrow, once next week. Three short touches beat one long one.

1 minEvidence: solid

Spread the same amount of study over time and you remember more of it, for longer. Over three hundred experiments agree. The longer you need to keep something, the wider the gaps should be. Evidence: solid

"An hour, tomorrow, next week" is a rule of thumb, not a tested schedule. The rule underneath is: let yourself nearly forget it, then pull it back. That's what makes it stick.

Pair it with testing yourself and you have most of what learning science knows.

Source: Cepeda et al., 2006, Psychological Bulletin (317 experiments) (link)

Same theme: Learning it

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