Spaced Repetition | Studying Effectively for GCSE's & A-level's

hey friends and welcome back to our series on studying effectively for gcses and a levels in this video we will be discussing space repetition which builds upon what we learned in the last video about acts of recall as always timestamps will be in the description down below so do check those out during the video

so before explaining what space repetition is it's helpful to learn about something called the forgetting curve so between 1880 and 1885 a psychologist caller hermann ebbinghaus became the first person to discover something known as the forgetting curve essentially he memorized meaningless syllables like wid or zoff and tested himself on the different syllables after different time periods and plosted their results on a graph and that led to the behavior that you can see now as you can see the number of syllables he could remember decayed in a logarithmic fashion and this graph became known as the forgetting curve now the y-axis can actually be generalized from the percentage of syllables remembered to the retention of anything really whether it be the percentage of a concept we can remember or how many capital cities we can remember after learning them or anything else later ebbinghaus noticed that if he incepted the forgetting cave by testing himself then the time taken to forget some percentage of the information would increase and if you do it again then it would increase further this is ultimately what space repetition is all about reviewing a piece of information at specific intervals ideally using active recall so i think the idea of space

repetition is best seen through a few studies which i will mention so in 1979 a study was done in which students learned english spanish wordpads during a teaching session and were then asked to participate in five more sessions in which they would have the chance to retrieve and relearn the translations they could not remember one group of students did all their sessions back to back another group had their session spaced out by day which meant there was some forgetting in between their sessions and the final group had their sessions spaced 30 days apart each group returned to lab 30 days after their last session and took a test to see how many of the words they could remember the first group who had their sessions back to back and were consistently scoring 90 plus percent in each session found their final score suddenly dropped sixty percent whilst a group who had that session spaced a day apart than theirs dropped to 86 percent which is 18 higher than nerve group whereas the final group had their sessions 30 days apart found their score actually increased from 82 in the last session to 95 in the final test so this was particularly interesting because it seemed that the trend had reversed and the students who were scoring well in the back-to-back sessions ended up performing the worst 30 days later and this is because of the forgetting curve meanwhile the students who were scoring the worst in each session end up scoring the best in the final test and this is because they were intercepting the forgetting curve at the key moments which helped their retention of the words increase and allowed them to remember their english spanish translations for longer what the study goes to show is that doing back to back active recall doesn't work as effectively as spacing out your active recall while spikes about active recall is better than not using accent recoil at all it goes to show that spacing out of active recall makes this technique even more powerful and space repetition isn't just useful for memorizing information like wordpads it also extends to concepts for instance in this 2011 study the authors took advantage of a curriculum change at the university statistics course when the course went from being taught over a six month period to an 8 week period this was significant because it limited students abilities to distribute their studies out so before and after the change was made each cohort of students were asked open-ended questions in which they would have to explain and relate concepts and statistics and were awarded points based on the answer they found that after their reform when the course was made shorter and more intense the cohort students with the shorter course scored less points on this conceptual test the conclusion was that by reducing the opportunities for space repetition in the course by making it shorter and more intense had negative effects on the new cohorts of students ability to understand the material and to show that this was due to space repetition and not just a difference in ability for this year group compared to the previous one it was shown that from both year groups and before and after the course change and they scored similarly well on and over course they were all taken and it turns out the effects of space repetition is so widespread that in the research review conducted in 2006 they found that across 254 studies with over 14 000 participants those who use space repetition scored on average 10 more than those who didn't and the difference between using space repetition and not using it was almost double in the case of when students had to retain information for 8 to 30 days so essentially space repetition is a widespread effect and has consistently shown students achieving better results across hundreds of studies a question then arises how long of interval should we have between each period of acting recall and this is a question we will answer later in the series

now in many of the studies i mentioned in my previous video while the students did perform really well using active recall compared to not using it after a week of not testing themselves if they hadn't tested themselves for a month then they would have performed even worse but still better than the group who didn't use accent recall and after three months they would have performed even worse and this was just because of the forgetting curve and that's unfortunately how human memory works for information like this whether we like or not rather than complaining about how bad our memory can be as humans we should instead hack the forgetting curve by using acts of recall at just right moments and because this means we have space hours starting out with a long interval space repetition is considered to be the opposite of cramming as well and the whole idea makes sense if you think about it every time you go to bed your brain clears out a lot of garbage that has been piling up during the day and if you cover something once then your brain may think it's not very useful and begin to forget it with each passing night but if you review the information repeatedly then you're basically telling your brain that this is important so your brain forgets it more slowly and the information sticks around much longer but rather than reviewing it every day which is not possible for entire subjects never mind several subjects we should use for the forgetting code to figure out roughly when we should review each piece of information and like we said

with vector recall a space repetition is so good then why is it that not many students use it and i think this comes down to a few reasons firstly not many students know about it i never sort of know about it i've never really internalized how effective a studying technique can be secondly for many students spacing out your practice can feel less productive for the very reason that some forgetting has to happen and you have to work harder to recall the concepts and facts it just doesn't feel like you're on top of the work as much compared to when you're looping over information your short-term memory through mindless repetition and this is an especially important point for space repetition to be effective the time intervals between reviews should be long enough such that you aren't mindlessly repeating the same information over and over again but not so long that you have forgotten everything and you have to relearn the material over again we will discuss more about the optimal time intervals in a later video and the third common reason is that many textbooks don't encourage spacing out your practice because they tend to group related information together and don't revisit previously learned information in later chapters the same thing happens in class as well most teachers don't revisit early topics until a month or two before exams and by that point many students have forgotten the topic and have to relearn it now there's nothing wrong with relearning the content it's just that if you have to do this for every subject and every topic the next thing you know you have to relearn pretty much half or two-thirds of every subject and month or two before your exam which is not always feasible and this is why we should be using space repetition if we want to be covering every bit of content a few times over before our exams now that your convinced space repetition is also a very powerful technique much of the remainder of the series will focus on how to implement space repetition alongside acts of recall so we can leverage the power of both to secure top grades in the most time efficient and most

effective manner ultimately having read dozens of studies on space repetition the researchers from the research review came to a conclusion that on the basis of the available evidence we rate distributed practice as having high utility it works across students of different ages with a wide variety of materials on the majority of the standard laboratory measurement and over long delays it is easy to implement although it may require some training and has been used successfully in a number of classroom studies although less research has examined distributed practice effects using complex materials the existing classroom studies have suggested that distributed practice should work for complex materials as well but yeah that's basically for this video and i'll see in the next video in the series