Spacing Out – Using Spaced Repetition to Lock Your Message in Students’ Minds

Remember cramming for final exams during high school or college?  I do! I stayed up late into the night – or all night – drinking powdered General Foods International Coffee. (Which, by the way, I just looked up and found on Amazon listed as “vintage” coffee – ouch!)

It was gruelling. I was exhausted the next day as I trudged to the classroom. And I always had a deep suspicion that I hadn’t done myself justice. I knew I should have started studying earlier, and put more time into it over the weeks before the test.

Now, as a teacher and learning professional, I understand why. Our brains do a much better job remembering things when we space our study out over time instead of doing it all at once. In today’s post, I’ll explain why that’s true and give you some examples of how you can use this strategy to help your audience remember what you teach them!

Strategy: Spaced Repetition

Spaced Repetition means spacing out review of a concept over time. For example, if you got ready for a test by studying for a half hour each day for five days, you would be using spaced repetition.  If you crammed for five hours the night before the test you would not!

How it works

Over time, the brain has a tendency to forget things.  Newsflash, right? What might not seem as intuitive is that over time, forgetting some things can help us remember other more important things better.  When we review information multiple different times over the course of several days or weeks, our brain has time to process the information and bring the important points into focus. Or to put it another way, our brain strengthens memories of things it deems important and encounters regularly.

A helpful analogy is to think of building memories as something like building muscle. If you work out for 30 minutes every other day, it allows your muscles to get stronger over time.  If you only work out once, you lose muscle tone quickly (believe me, I know!).

How you can use it

To help your students or audience strengthen memory of important concepts, give them opportunities to review more than once over time.

Examples for a live presentation

If you’re giving a live presentation like a workshop or webinar, it’s harder to use this technique, because ideally, the spacing of review would take place over a series of days.  But here are two ideas, one to use during your presentation, and one after it’s done.

Example 1

Mention the most important concepts multiple times throughout your presentation.  One way to do this is to give an overview of key concepts at the beginning, talk about each in more detail during the presentation, then at the end of your presentation, summarize the key points.  This may sound familiar as the “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you just told them” method. Here’s how that could look:

If I were giving a webinar on two techniques to improve study habits, I could open by saying, 

“Today’s presentation will teach you two great strategies for improving your study habits.  The first is retrieval practice, or recalling important ideas from memory, and the other is spaced repetition, which is spacing out review of important concepts over time.”

During the presentation, I could then discuss each of the techniques in detail, give examples, etc.  At the end of the presentation, I could say something like, 

“In summary, today we talked about two methods you can use to improve your study habits.  The first was retrieval practice, where you recall key facts from memory while studying, and the second was spaced repetition, where you space review of key facts over time to strengthen those memories.”

It may sound a little repetitive, but remember that over the course of an hour-long presentation, there could be as much as 30 minutes between each mention of the concept.  Enough to provide some spacing, and to allow your student’s brains to start consolidating the information.

Example 2

Another way to provide spaced repetition for students participating in a live presentation is with a follow-up email. Send participants an email the day after the presentation to thank them for attending, and include a summary of the key concepts you taught them. In this way, you can space the time between review by a day or more, which makes it even more effective!

Example for an online course

There are a lot of opportunities for spaced repetition in an online course environment. You could start by incorporating the two examples above: mentioning key concepts more than once in presentations (in this case, your course videos), and emailing participants with a review of important material.

In addition, at the beginning of each new module, summarize the important points from the previous module as a lead-in to what students will learn in the new material.  If it is a multi-week course, include a review of the previous week’s key take-aways at the beginning of the new week. 

Pro tip: I learned a great technique from Sarah Cordiner, who has an excellent website that teaches people how to build online courses. She suggests keeping information that summarizes previous lessons out of your course videos so that you can repurpose and reorganize them if you need to. 

Instead, I suggest putting your summary review in the text above or below the video. If you want to make a change later, it’s much easier to edit text than to re-record an entire video!

Summing it up

• Spaced Repetition means spacing out review of a concept over time to consolidate the memory in your mind.
• It works because our brains strengthen memories of things they encounter regularly.
• Use this strategy by mentioning key concepts more than once spaced throughout a presentation, summarizing last week’s key points at the beginning of the next week’s module in an online course, or by sending participants an email a few days later that includes a review of the key points of your message.

I hope you are able to use this Bite-sized Teaching strategy in your own presentations and courses!  Please leave a comment below to let me know if you have any other suggestions for how to use spaced repetition to help people learn!