• Question: I have been interested in spacing he learning of my students over their 2 year GCSE / A Level course. What do you suggest the optimum spacing time is over the two year course that would enable students to cover all the content and review it? Also it what format has it been shown best to review the content, re teach? Testing?

    Asked by sjays to Michael, Katherine, Joni, Iroise, Duncan, Daniel, Catriona, Anna on 20 Apr 2015.
    • Photo: Iroise Dumontheil

      Iroise Dumontheil answered on 20 Apr 2015:

      This is quite a broad question and I don’t think I will have the full answer, but there are researchers interested in this type of issues.
      For example, Paul Kelley and colleagues have suggested and tested the effect of what they call spaced learning, which they based on neuroscience research in different species. The idea is that to faciliate long term retention you should repeat a stimulus three times over a few minutes. They published a paper reporting trying this approach in the educational context:
      http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00589/full
      This paper will probably review quite a lot of the relevant literature.

      Repeated retrieval of information (e.g. via testing) has been suggested to be useful to consolidate memories, as discussed in this paper:
      http://lrc.cornell.edu/events/Papers_13/Haarman5.pdf

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