Let learning breathe: to progress, time is your best ally!

Sustainable learning takes time. Time to breathe and to progress

It's the start of the week: your learners have until Friday to complete three customer relationship e-learning modules, and most have barely started...
To motivate them, you plan to give them binding deadlines. Is it better if they completed all three modules on Thursday? Or is it better to force them to finish the first module on Tuesday, the second on Wednesday, and the third on Thursday?

The answer depends on what you want them to get out of it. If the objective is to make them pass an exam on Friday morning, the first schedule may be just right. If, on the contrary, you want them to develop real long-term skills in their work, the second schedule will be much more effective, because it is more spread over time. It will also be even more effective if you encourage them to come back to the modules a week later, a month later, and so on...

Far from being trivial, the beneficial effect ofspacing is one of the main pillars of sustainable learning. Who of you still remembers your high school philosophy courses? Just like cramming, intensive strength training, or lists of New Year's resolutions, what researchers callMassed learning produces effects that are as visible in the moment as they are evanescent over time. It is quite the opposite for theSpaced learning : giving you time to forget and then to remember, you will have more difficulties in the short term, but What you remember will stay with you longer. Too often sacrificed for practical constraints, this question of spacing is nevertheless crucial in view of its significant impact on the acquisition of skills.

Why is there such a gap in performance between those who learn everything on the same day and those who spread their learning over several days?

At the neural level: spacing protects the neurons in your memory

A first explanation of the beneficial effect of spacing on learning comes from neurosciences. A neuroimaging study in animals seems to indicate that the effectiveness of spacing learning is linked to better survival of hippocampal neurons (linked to memory).

These neurons are generated in your brain every day. However, many of them die naturally after a few weeks. To survive, hippocampal neurons need to be mobilized.

Therefore, Spacing out learning moments saves more neurons than massed sessions, because new neurons that can be mobilized will have appeared between each session. This method will therefore allow you to remember more of what you have learned.

At the psychological level: more feedback and more effort for better learning

A second explanation for the positive impact of spaced learning is based on cognitive psychology.

If your friend has just explained the rules of bridge to you and she immediately asks you a question to check that you have understood correctly, the information is still stored in your short-term memory: you can therefore return it as easily as if you were asked to pass the salt on your right hand side of the table.

If you wait until the next day to try to remember the rules of the game, you may be wrong, but you will get So a Feedback clear about your real level of control, in contrast to immediate feedback, which often reflects nothing other than the temporary temporary persistence of information in your short-term memory. In addition, you are going to have to provide a greater effort to remind you of what we explained to you.

These two behavioral mechanisms (the Feedback and the effort) will allow you to more easily retrace the path that leads to the information you are looking for when you need them in the future. Your difficulties in retrieving information, far from being obstacles to your learning, will help you consolidate it in the long term.

Don't shoot the skill tree

Learning spacing is even better understood if we take a metaphor. Let's imagine your memory as a forest. The paths that cross it are the traces of your learning in your memory; the vegetation that gradually covers them represents oblivion. When you hike the same trail four times in one day, you don't clear the path any more than if you'd only taken that trail two or three times. On the other hand, if you don't go back, the vegetation will grow back more quickly in the long term. Walking the trail the same number of times over a longer period of time prevents vegetation from covering the trail for longer.

A second metaphor useful for understanding is to think of skills as plants to grow. It is not by watering the plant more that we help it grow, but by watering it regularly at the right dose. “You don't make a plant grow faster by shooting at it”, tell us our grandmothers who, as is often the case, are right. When neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and grandmothers agree on the same principle, it is high time to move on to implementation.

Practical tips for teachers and trainers

• Allow at least one day to pass between your learning sessions: your learners need time to create a correct mental record of what they have just learned.
  
  
• Start each learning session with active recovery exercises
  from what was seen during the previous session.
  
  
• Mix spacing and alternating concepts to work on to Increase the difficulty level : the effect will be all the stronger.
  
  
• Space differently depending on the skill to be transmitted : a few days are enough for a simple list of vocabulary words, but if you are teaching more complex concepts, feel free to space them out by several weeks.
  
  
• To find the right amount of spacing, Offer a test at the beginning of the course to determine where your learners are : this positioning test will allow you to know the concepts for which their memory needs a little refreshment.
  
  
• Reconcile spacing and sustainable motivation : just because you let time pass between learning moments doesn't mean your learners will lose motivation. Motivation can be strengthened in many ways that are in no way incompatible with spacing learning. For example, you will reinforce it by offering the good level of challenge to your learners.
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About Didask
Didask has developed a digital learning design solution that allows everyone, even without pedagogical or technical prerequisites, to create effective modules, and whose structure automatically takes into account the recommendations of cognitive science research, especially in terms of learning spacing.

sourcing

1) Bahrick, H.P., & Hall, L.K. (2005). The importance of retrieval failures to long-term retention: A metacognitive explanation of the spacing effect. Journal of Memory and Language, 52(4), 566-577.

2) Sisti, H.M., Glass, A.L., & Shors, T.J. (2007). Neurogenesis and the Spacing Effect: Learning Over Time Enhances Memory and the Survival of New Neurons. Learning & memory, 14(5), 368-375.

3) Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.