By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel

Recap: Researching spaced practice

When researchers investigate spaced practice, they usually manipulate the time between two or more learning sessions and investigate the effect of different spacings on final memory performance. For example, they would set up three spacing conditions – no spacing between learning sessions, 1 day between learning sessions, 1 week between learning sessions – and randomly assign students to one of these conditions. Later, all students take the same final test and the test scores are compared between conditions. Using this approach, we can draw conclusions about whether spacing between study sessions leads to better test performance. Many experiments of this kind show large benefits of spacing one’s study sessions. While these experiments are a vital starting point for practical recommendations, it is important to cross validate the findings using different research approaches and to investigate natural student behavior as it occurs in real learning environments. 

Recording authentic student study behavior

A recently published study by Carvalho, Sana, and Yan (1) contributes to the evidence base supporting spaced practice by approaching the question about the benefits of spaced practice differently: They recorded the authentic study behavior of students enrolled in an online course. The online course consisted of 12 units and required students to complete readings, watch video lectures, and engage in activities. Each week concluded with a unit quiz and students took a final exam covering the entire material after the last unit. The researchers used data that was recorded in the online course platform to analyze student behavior (i.e., learning analytics): number of times students logged in and engaged with tasks (i.e., number of sessions), intervals between interacting with tasks, total time spent on activities, activity completion rate, and so on. As indicator for spacing they used the number of sessions students took to complete a unit – with more sessions translating to more spacing. What is neat about this approach is that it allows capturing natural student learning behavior in an authentic learning environment. Study behavior data of 639 students was analyzed.

Relationship between student ability, self-regulated spaced practice, and performance

Three main outcomes emerged from this study:

1. More spacing was associated with higher performance on quizzes – independent of the total time spent on a unit or student performance on a pretest (i.e., student ability). Put differently, when students used more spacing when interacting with the unit material they performed better on the quizzes.

2. More able students tended to space their study sessions more than less able students. However, and this is intriguing, less able students benefitted much more from spacing than more able students: For low ability students, more spacing was clearly associated with higher quiz performance, whereas, for high ability students, quiz performance was not associated with spacing – they performed well independent of spacing.

3. Student engagement with the activities in the course moderated the relationship between spacing and quiz performance. When students completed less activities in the online course, spacing was more strongly associated with higher quiz performance. The authors explain that “spacing out study appears to buffer students against the negative effects of otherwise passive learning”. Put differently, students who are less motivated to complete learning tasks may be able to make up for this by spacing their study sessions.

Conclusion

Using an approach that allowed for a more authentic analysis of student behavior added to the supporting evidence for spaced practice as a beneficial learning strategy. An interesting point raised in this study is the role of student ability and the finding that spacing particularly increased quiz performance for low ability students. Moreover, a lack of engagement with learning activities could be attenuated by adding more spacing during studying.

References:

(1) Carvalho, P. F., Sana, F., & Yan, V. X. (2020). Self-regulated spacing in a massive open online course is related to better learning. NPJ Science of Learning, 5, 1-7.