SPACING EFFECT AND CRAMMING



Spacing Effect and Cramming



Spacing Effect and Cramming

Spacing Effect

Herman Ebbinghous was the first person who identified the spacing effect more than a century ago. According to Ebbinghous, the study distribution over a session effects the assimilation of information in long-term memory. This effect is known as spacing effect. A multitude of researcher recently has provided support to the studies of Ebbinghous's observation. This support of generated based on various studies including a long-term recall of Spanish vocabularies that the researcher learnt over the period of 8 years.

The effect elaborated that learning is not acquired properly in massed practice and practices which include cramming of various things over a period of a short time span. The more the distribution of learning over time, the more will be the effects on long-term memory. To learn more about them, researchers at the RIKEN Brain Institute have developed a technology to quantify the effects of motor learning by the use of horizontal optokinetic response (HOKR). By studying the movement of the eye in mice, scientists have noticed that the efficiency of learning is largely dependent on the spacing of sessions with rest periods.

While the effects of an intensive seem disappear in 24 hours, those obtained through sessions spaced persist. Previous research suggested that the spacing effect is the product of the transfer of the working memory of the flocculus (region of the cerebral cortex) to the vestibular nuclei. To test this theory and the transfer of information, the researchers administered a local anesthetic in the flocculus of mice at the end of workouts (Dembo, 2000). The results in mice having undergone extensive training, condensed and restless were virtually nonexistent. On the contrary, those obtained in the case of mice having rested for several hours between each session remained the same, suggesting that during those 4 hours of rest, the information was already treated as the long-term memory.

The injection of two antibiotics (anisomycin and actinomycin D) inhibitors of protein synthesis in the flocculus of mice just before their sessions did not observe an effect of the spacing because the results were identical with the batch of mice have undergone intensive training for an hour without rest. The conclusion of this last experiment indicates that the proteins produced during the learning play a pivotal role in the development of long-term memory. This represents significant progress in understanding the phenomena related to memory and learning (Hewitt, 2008).These are the first research providing a neurological explanation of the benefits of breaks between work sessions and learning.

This strategy of spacing effect can be used in the context of schools, colleges, and various other sort of educational institution, which requires students to learn various texts. Therefore, when we start learning something, we should develop a proper strategy. This strategy must disseminate the work in to several spaces to make the learning stronger.

Example

The principle of the spacing effect is important to remember in studying. You will recall information longer, on average, if you distribute your ...