Lectures are an important learning experience in higher education and elsewhere, but they also tend to be quite intensive. Research on human memory, however, suggests that learning is more durable and transferable when learning is spaced out over time (distributed practice).
Without having to radically change the timetable or format of your teaching, what are your ideas for how to apply distributed practice to lectures and therefore make learning stick better?
Distributed practice provides adequate rest periods if task is complex, long, or energy costly or if learner fatigues easily, has short attention span and poor concentration. We can apply such useful and helpful strategy at each and every stage of teaching and learning process (acquisition, retention, transfer).
Many thanks for your answer, Hassan Izzeddin Sarsak! I agree that it can help with focus, and that it can be helpful at every stage of teaching.
The empirical evidence behind distributed practice (DP) supports incorporating it into our classes. Classes with problem sets (e.g., math/stat, physical sciences) can embed DP with problems that repeat previously-learned concepts or embed the earlier concepts as sub-steps in problems with the newer concepts. Many K-12 textbooks do this in homework. How to use DP in content-oriented classes with diverse concepts, that don't always build, is less clear. I teach Introductory Psychology - an overview of many sub-disciplines. Resembling DP, I'll keep coming back to common threads (e.g., how nature and nurture interact). Themes is quite a leap from low-level experimental designs of DP in Cognitive Psychology, so I'm unsure how well the evidence applies. My motive is less about increasing retrieval and automating processes, and more about hopefully deepening students conceptual understanding. What are you considering for your classes, Jonathan? Best wishes, Kevin
Hello
I share chapter by groups of 4 or 5 students
Then we do a forum and they write one inform
It is important to do an exposition
Best regards
Ingrid García
I'd agree Kevin Grobman that there is something of a gap between delivering content in lectures and the experimental models of DP. But there are also some studies that have used realistic educational texts or simulated lectures (e.g. "Spacing in a simulated undergraduate classroom" by Kapler et al, 2015). As you say, returning to concepts in later lectures could provide some natural spaced practice and could also help deepen conceptual understanding. Both are important, arguably. Without the practice there could be a lot of forgetting.
My own tendency in the past, I suppose, has to be to deliver a single topic in a single lecture, that seems the neatest and simplest way to plan and it's what students expect, but perhaps there would be an argument for splitting one topic over two sessions. There is also usually room for a recap, sometimes in the next lecture or sometimes further on.
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