“You can get a great deal from rehearsal, If it just has the proper dispersal. You would just be an ass, To do it en masse, Your remembering would turn out much worsal.” - Ulrich Neisser
When most people want to memorize something, they will generally reread, relisten or resay the information many times over a short period. While this method will work after a while, it’s not the best, or even close.
Instead, what you should do is look at whatever material you need to study for a brief period, then wait a day to review it again. If you have no problem remembering the material, put it away again, but this time don’t review it for two or three days. Each time you review the material and find you’re still remembering it, increase the amount of time between reviews. The strategy I just described relies on practicing “a little bit here, a little bit there”—short review sessions, spaced out over a significant chunk of time, at least two weeks before the exam—to cement material into the mind using sturdy neural bricks that won’t break down on test day.
Spaced repetition, as it’s called, is very much like watering your lawn three days a week for thirty minutes, instead of once for ninety. You’re not working any harder or spending any more time (in most cases you actually need less time), but the impact is profound. No other technique comes close in terms of immediate, noticeable, and reliable results.
Embedding new learning in long-term memory, in which material is given meaning and connected to prior knowledge, is a process that unfolds over hours, and often days. By spacing out your practice, you let some forgetting set in (making it harder to recall concepts), but the effort required and the time periods between sessions vastly increase the strength of the relevant memories.
“So what is the optimal interval to wait before studying something again?” you might ask. Well, you want a little forgetting to set in, so the next session requires effort, but not too much forgetting so you have to fully relearn all the material.
In 2008, UCSD professors analyzed twenty-six different study schedules and actually settled on an optimized distribution1. In short, if you want to know how to best split up your sessions, you need to decide how long you wish to remember something. The most widely spaced, longest schedule is the most effective. With longer spaces, you forget more, but you find out what your weaknesses are and you correct for them. You discover which associations, which cues, which hints are working and which aren’t. And if they’re not working you come up with new ones.