Spaced practice: The 130 year-old trick for making training…

If there was a simple way you could help learners retain more information over long periods of time would you use it?

One of the earliest pieces of research into memory and learning identified a technique called spaced practice. It significantly improves the recall of information and it could be the key to achieving better long-term results from your training.

What is spaced practice?

Hermann Ebbinghaus , a pioneering memory researcher was the first person to document what he called “the forgetting curve” in his 1885 paper Über das Gedächtnis, translated as “On Memory".

He observed that the rate of forgetting is highest immediately after learning happens. After only a day, two thirds of the information learned is gone.

The original experiments that Ebbinghaus performed were based on remembering nonsense syllables. However, it also works with basic skills like typing as well as remembering facts and processes.

By revisiting the learning, you bring the level of recall back to the top of the graph and the rate of forgetting reduces after each visit.

The key finding was that if you space the practice of the learning out at longer and longer intervals, the curve eventually flattens out and knowledge is retained more effectively.

Further reading:

• Will Thalheimer offers practical advice (pdf) for introducing the spacing effect to workplace learning
• Robert Bjork explains the benefits of the practice in this YouTube video
• This article by Daniel T. Willingham is an accessible and practical discussion of the benefits and potential limitations of the spacing effect in practice.

How can it help me?

As an L&D professional, you want your learners to retain information because it’s valuable and because they can build on it in the future when developing advanced skills.
It’s not going to be a silver bullet that fixes issues or turns around poor performance on its own. The best way to see a real impact from spaced practice is to make small tweaks to your course design and implementation.

Any area where skills are going to be used over the long-term will benefit from better knowledge retention. Skills development and sales & product knowledge training are two areas that lend themselves well to spaced practice.

You could introduce the technique to induction and training on company culture in order to better reinforce a message.

It’s also useful in training for real events that happen rarely but where knowledge retention is key. First aid or fire safety both require specific knowledge that is rarely used in everyday life.

Spaced practice will help learners absorb this type of knowledge and have it ready when it’s needed most.

How can I put spaced practice into action?

Make your training stick by putting the spacing effect to work with these practical steps:

• Find the key facts and processes
• Break the key facts down into individual sections
• Schedule reviews of the small sections
• Include reviews of key sections in subsequent courses

Some of these tasks will already be part of your learning design process. You may already have the building blocks of a good spaced practice approach.

An example of a spaced practice for elearning

We’ll show you one way you can put the process into action. We’re going to take a fire safety compliance course and give your learners the benefit of spacing effect.

• Find the key facts and processes and break them down

You identify the following areas that are critical to fire safety training:

• The fire triangle
• Precautions to take
• Fire alarms
• Evacuation procedure
• Types of fire
• Types of fire extinguisher

Then you dive deeper into one of the key parts of the course: Types of fire extinguisher.

• Water
• Dry powder
• Foam
• CO2

You design a series of learning interactions to teach learners when to use each extinguisher. They range from simple multiple-choice questions, to infographics, to learning games featuring the different extinguisher types.

You then repeat the process for all the key areas.

• Schedule reviews of the small sections

Now you have the fundamental pieces of training, you can design a learning schedule that incorporates spaced practice.