Dempster’s article addresses possible issues that may have restricted or inhibited the classroom application of research on the spacing effect.
The Leitner System describes a method of spaced repetition in flashcard practice that has been adopted by many flashcard software. In it’s simplest form the system presumes known items require less practice, and unknown items require more. Learning time is saved by moving occurrence of known items “farther” from the user in the repetition pattern. A simple example uses 3 boxes that may be spaced for practice 1, 3, and 5 days, with unknown in the first box, and known words moving back a box each time they are correctly identified.
I don’t know whether this shows how smart I was in school, or how dumb: I never used flashcards. I never thought I needed to. And so the idea of spaced repetition and the identification of a spacing effect was new to me, and not immediately obvious as I think Tyler pointed out on his blog. Though I haven’t used flashcards in the past, recently I’ve discovered an application for flashcards (this may be because I’m getting older, or I have actual need of specific information on the fly beyond acing a test, or whatever) in writing metrical poetry. As Daniel Willingham explains, sufficient background knowledge is not just important to help one understand new information, it’s important in formulating creative solutions to problems. With respect to metrical poetry, without an extensive “vocabulary” of poesis, I lack a sufficient range of tools with which to tackle a poetic “problem”–meters, rhythms, rhyme schemes, and forms. And it’s not just being able to define these forms, it’s knowing examples of these forms, and why particular examples are relevant to the form itself, so that, as a writer, one can draw upon knowledge of possible effects of various forms as one tries to create one’s own effects. Both the vocabulary of poesis and examples of forms are, to me, excellent topics for flashcards.
Cepeda et al’s quantitative review (this is different from a meta-analysis how?) focuses on 184 articles covering 317 experiments that test the effect of interstudy interval (ISI) upon learning. This review focuses on verbal memory tasks because they have been used in the greatest number of studies on distributed practice (and perhaps, as the authors imply, because verbal memory tasks seem to respond the best to ISI). The results of this review suggest “spaced presentations led to markedly better final-test performance, compared with massed presentations”. The conclusions regarding lag analysis are harder to articulate in summary, so I’ll just quote the authors wholesale:
…synthetic analyses support the robustness and generality of ISI and retention internal joing effects… the literature as a whole reflects nonmonotonic effect of absolute ISI upon memory performance at a given interval, as well as the positive relationship between retention interval and the optimal absolute ISI value for that retention interval.
Of interest to those looking into the Leitner system, this review also found that, “overall, expanding ISIs led to better performance than fixed intervals” (364). It doesn’t appear that this review examined the efficiency of expanding ISIs, which is of particular interest to me.
IPT 564 Readings on Spacing Effect
Notes on assigned readings on spacing effect:
Dempster, The Spacing Effect
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system
Dempster’s article addresses possible issues that may have restricted or inhibited the classroom application of research on the spacing effect.
The Leitner System describes a method of spaced repetition in flashcard practice that has been adopted by many flashcard software. In it’s simplest form the system presumes known items require less practice, and unknown items require more. Learning time is saved by moving occurrence of known items “farther” from the user in the repetition pattern. A simple example uses 3 boxes that may be spaced for practice 1, 3, and 5 days, with unknown in the first box, and known words moving back a box each time they are correctly identified.
I don’t know whether this shows how smart I was in school, or how dumb: I never used flashcards. I never thought I needed to. And so the idea of spaced repetition and the identification of a spacing effect was new to me, and not immediately obvious as I think Tyler pointed out on his blog. Though I haven’t used flashcards in the past, recently I’ve discovered an application for flashcards (this may be because I’m getting older, or I have actual need of specific information on the fly beyond acing a test, or whatever) in writing metrical poetry. As Daniel Willingham explains, sufficient background knowledge is not just important to help one understand new information, it’s important in formulating creative solutions to problems. With respect to metrical poetry, without an extensive “vocabulary” of poesis, I lack a sufficient range of tools with which to tackle a poetic “problem”–meters, rhythms, rhyme schemes, and forms. And it’s not just being able to define these forms, it’s knowing examples of these forms, and why particular examples are relevant to the form itself, so that, as a writer, one can draw upon knowledge of possible effects of various forms as one tries to create one’s own effects. Both the vocabulary of poesis and examples of forms are, to me, excellent topics for flashcards.
Cepeda, Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis
Cepeda et al’s quantitative review (this is different from a meta-analysis how?) focuses on 184 articles covering 317 experiments that test the effect of interstudy interval (ISI) upon learning. This review focuses on verbal memory tasks because they have been used in the greatest number of studies on distributed practice (and perhaps, as the authors imply, because verbal memory tasks seem to respond the best to ISI). The results of this review suggest “spaced presentations led to markedly better final-test performance, compared with massed presentations”. The conclusions regarding lag analysis are harder to articulate in summary, so I’ll just quote the authors wholesale:
Of interest to those looking into the Leitner system, this review also found that, “overall, expanding ISIs led to better performance than fixed intervals” (364). It doesn’t appear that this review examined the efficiency of expanding ISIs, which is of particular interest to me.
Keller, How to integrate learner motivation planning into lesson planning: The ARCS model approach