Spaced vs. mass practice
Overview
- Influence: Spaced vs. mass practice
- Domain: Student Learning Strategies
- Sub-Domain: Learning strategies
- Potential to Accelerate Student Achievement: Potential to considerably accelerate
- Influence Definition: The claim is that students are better able to commit information to memory when they study that information in spaced (or distributed) intervals rather than all at once in a “massed” interval. Spaced practices involve practice broken up into a number of shorter sessions, over a longer period of time. Massed practice consists of fewer, longer training sessions.
Evidence
- Number of meta-analyses: 5
- Number of studies: 510
- Number of students: 167,763
- Number of effects: 1,115
- Effect size: 0.65
Meta-Analyses
Journal Title | Author | First Author's Country | Article Name | Year Published | Variable | Number of Studies | Number of Students | Number of Effects | Effect Size |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Research quarterly for exercise and sport | Lee & Genovese | Distribution of practice in motor skill acquisition: Learning and performance effects reconsidered | 1988 | Spaced vs. massed practice | 52 | 0 | 52 | 0.96 | |
Journal of Applied Psychology | Donovan & Radosevich | USA | A meta-analytic review of the distribution of practice effect: Now you see it, now you don't | 1999 | Spaced vs. massed practice | 63 | 0 | 112 | 0.46 |
Journal of Consumer Research | Janiszewski, Noel & Sawyer | USA | A meta-analysis of the spacing effect in verbal learning: Implications for research on advertising repetition and consumer memory | 2003 | Spaced vs. massed practice | 61 | 0 | 484 | 0.72 |
Nature: Science of Learning | Donoghue & Hattie | Australia | Learning strategies: A synthesis and conceptual model. | 2018 | Distributed practice | 150 | 152,952 | 150 | 0.85 |
Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie | Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer | USA | Optimizing distributed practice | 2009 | Spaced vs. massed practice | 184 | 14,811 | 317 | 0.27 |
TOTAL/AVERAGE | 510 | 167,763 | 1,115 | 0.65 |
Confidence
The Confidence is the average of these four measures, each divided into five approximately equal groups and assigned a value from 1 to 5 based on the following criteria:
-
Number of Meta-analyses
- 1 = 1
- 2 = 2–3
- 3 = 4–6
- 4 = 7–9
- 5 = 10+
-
Number of Studies
- 1 = 1–10
- 2 = 11–50
- 3 = 51–200
- 4 = 201–400
- 5 = 400+
-
Number of Students
- 1 = 1–2,500
- 2 = 2,501–10,000
- 3 = 10,000–20,000
- 4 = 20,000–100,000
- 5 = 100,001+
-
Number of Effects
- 1 = 1–100
- 2 = 101–300
- 3 = 301–600
- 4 = 601–1,200
- 5 = 1,200+
Number of Meta-Analyses | Number of Studies | Number of Students | Number of Effects | Overall Confidence | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Confidence Factor | 3 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 |