“I don’t want to practice today!” my daughter said about her daily violin practice. “Why can’t I just skip it and practice two hours on Saturday instead?”
Thankfully, my husband, a musician himself, jumped in: “You get better results if you practice a little each day.” The teacher in me couldn’t agree more. He accurately described a learning method we educators know as “spaced practice.” Whether it’s learning how to play an instrument or learning times tables, it works and even provides something AI can’t. Here are 4 reasons you should consider it for your children.
1. It’s easier for kids to accept.
Which sounds better? “You have to study your spelling words for an hour tonight because your test is tomorrow.” Or, “Let’s set the timer for eight minutes to go over your spelling words, and then you’re done.” Getting kids to do something is easier when you break it into smaller chunks of time that are spaced out over several days.
So, if your child has to learn 10 spelling words by Friday, start using spaced practice on Monday with the first five words. On Tuesday, work on the remaining five. On Wednesday, go back to Monday’s words. On Thursday, review Tuesday’s. You can mix up the study methods—write the words, spell them out loud, spell them while jumping—just be sure she’s studying some of the words every day. Check out these five time-tested study skills she can use during spaced practice.
2. It works.
Kids call last-minute studying for a test “cramming.” Researchers call it “massed practice.” Teachers call it a disaster. No matter what it’s called, it doesn’t work for long-term retention. Spaced practice does. University of Melbourne researchers found that “gaps between exposures have a positive effect.” In other words, the gaps are what power spaced practice.
A study published in The Journal of Neuroscience used brain scans to watch what happens when people study with spaced practice instead of cramming. Researchers found that spaced practice creates more consistent neural patterns in brain activity, leading to better long-term learning.
So if your middle-schooler or high-schooler uses spaced practice, they’ll be able to recall a semester’s worth of learning more easily when midterms or finals come along. The key is to have your child review the material at expanding intervals rather than every day. For example, when your child gets home from school on Monday, have her review what she learned in class that day. On Tuesday, she’ll review Tuesday’s lessons but skip Monday’s. Instead, she’ll revisit Monday’s material on Wednesday, and so on as the week progresses. She needs a gap of at least a day before she tries to retrieve that information. The brain uses that gap to lock in the information.
3. It makes kids struggle in a good way.
With spaced practice, your child reviews material from previous days with built-in gaps. As she tries to retrieve that knowledge, she might struggle to remember it. That’s a good thing. The effort of trying to remember what she’s already studied leads to better retention. That effort makes up for the cognitive offloading she’s likely doing by using AI elsewhere in her life.
Cognitive offloading is when we let AI do the thinking for us. Professor Ethan Mollick says that when children do this type of cognitive offloading in a learning environment, it “undermines mental effort.” Spaced practice forces kids to struggle a bit, something AI lets them skip. One more note on this point: When you introduce spaced practice, give your child a heads-up that she won’t remember all the previous material the first time she revisits it. Reassure her that this is normal. Explain that the struggle builds her “mental muscle,” making her a stronger student and helping her retain what she’s learning. Spaced practice can also help anxious test-takers relax because they’ll feel more confident they can remember what they studied.
4. It’s effective for children with learning challenges.
Spaced practice is especially helpful for ADHD learners whose attention spans benefit from shorter study bursts. Pair spaced practice with other study methods that your ADHD learner has done well with in the past. If he likes index cards, help him organize his cards by study day—Monday’s cards get moved to Wednesday, Tuesday’s cards to Thursday, and so on. Children on the autism spectrum and those with dyslexia or other learning challenges can also benefit from using flashcards during spaced practice. For them, sort each day’s cards into two piles, “Still learning” and “Got it!” As mentioned before, remind them that recalling older information might be a challenge.
How-To for Spaced Practice
Take a look at this graphic that walks you through the how-to of spaced practice. It explains how kids can use it to study for tests and review and remember what they learned that day in school.
Have you tried spaced practice with your kids? Has it helped?
