New Study
Today I’m reviewing a study that recently came out looking at how students choose to use spacing in their own study and how it relates to their performance (1). Importantly, the researchers recognized a limitation in the way students were being asked about their study habits in previous research on spacing. Here are common ways that students are asked about spacing their study habits:
Which of the following statements best describes when your studying occurred during the weeks leading up to this exam?
A. The majority of my studying occurred 1-2 days before the exam.
B. The majority of my studying occurred during the 7 days before the exam.
C. The majority of my studying occurred more than a week before the exam.
D. My studying was pretty evenly spread out across the weeks.
This question is aimed at looking at cramming behavior in particular and research DOES show that students tend to cram and do most their studying just before any given exam (2). However, what students are doing when they do spread out that study matters quite a lot too.
The true spacing effect, as measured in experimental research, is a spaced review effect. That is, the same material is reviewed multiple times, spread out over sessions. It is not that everything is viewed once, spread out over time.
In this study, they added a new question:
Please rate your agreement with the following statement: When studying different concepts for this exam, I made sure that I studied the very same concepts more than once.
This question is targeted at the review part of spaced review, not just the distance between study sessions.
Results
Unsurprisingly, most students crammed in this study, but there was actually quite a bit of variability as to whether their cramming sessions involved reviewing the material more than once.
