Ten Minutes a Day for Exam Prep: What Research on Spacing Shows

Ten minutes a day, every day for a year, comes to 3,650 minutes, or about 61 hours. Five days a week, it is about 43 hours a year.

Whether that is enough for an exam depends on the gap between your level now and the level you need. Cambridge’s estimates of the hours needed for each level, and how to work back from an exam date, are in How Many Hours Does It Take to Go Up One CEFR Level?

This post is about a different question. If the total time is the same, does it matter whether you use it in one block or in short sessions spread over many days? Memory researchers have studied this for a long time under the names distributed practice and the spacing effect.

Spread-Out Study Lasts Longer

In 2006, Cepeda and colleagues published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin of distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. It brought together 839 assessments from 317 experiments in 184 articles.

The analysis compared repeated study in one go with study spread over separate sessions, and it also compared shorter and longer gaps. It found that the gap between study sessions and the time until the final test work together. The gap that gave the best retention grew longer as the time until the test grew longer.

The Longer Until the Test, the Longer the Gap

In 2008 the same group published a study in Psychological Science over much longer periods. More than 1,350 people learned a set of facts, had one review after a gap of up to 3.5 months, and took a final test up to a year after that.

For any test delay, making the gap longer first raised final test scores and then slowly lowered them. The best gap grew as the test delay grew. As a share of the test delay, though, it fell from about 20 to 40% for a test one week later to about 5 to 10% for a test one year later. In days, that is roughly one and a half to just under three days for a one-week delay, and roughly 18 to 37 days for a one-year delay.

The authors write that this relationship between gap and test delay implies that many educational practices are highly inefficient.

A Nine-Year Vocabulary Study

For foreign language vocabulary, there is a 1993 study by Bahrick and colleagues in Psychological Science. Over nine years, four participants learned and relearned 300 English and foreign language word pairs. They had either 13 or 26 relearning sessions, spaced 14, 28 or 56 days apart, and were tested 1, 2, 3 or 5 years after training ended.

Longer gaps slowed learning down slightly, but that was more than offset by much higher retention. Thirteen sessions 56 days apart gave about the same retention as 26 sessions 14 days apart. The benefit of more sessions and the benefit of spacing were independent of each other, and both helped regardless of how hard the words were.

Cramming Feels Better

In 2009, Kornell published flashcard experiments in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Participants used a web-based study program to learn GRE-type word pairs.

Splitting flashcards into small stacks means each card comes back sooner, so the spacing is shorter. In three experiments, studying one large stack worked better than studying four small stacks separately. Spacing also worked better than cramming, that is, massing study on the last day before the test.

Spacing was more effective for 90% of the participants. Yet after the first study session, 72% of them believed that massing had been more effective. At that point, most participants had not noticed the benefit of spacing.

Ten Techniques Compared

In 2013, Dunlosky and colleagues published a review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest of ten learning techniques that students commonly use. They judged each one by whether its benefits hold across four kinds of variables: learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and the tasks used to measure results.

Only two techniques received a high utility rating: practice testing and distributed practice. The reason given is that they help learners of different ages and abilities, improve performance on many kinds of tasks, and have worked in real educational settings. Rereading and highlighting received low ratings, and the review gives the example of using practice testing instead of rereading.

The studies by Cepeda, Bahrick and Kornell measured how well people remembered words and facts. How to split time between short sessions and longer blocks is covered in the “Counting short study sessions” part of the post on hours per CEFR level. One way to lengthen the gaps between word reviews is described in What Is the Leitner System?.

Sources

• Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354-380.
• Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., & Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095-1102.
• Bahrick, H. P., Bahrick, L. E., Bahrick, A. S., & Bahrick, P. E. (1993). Maintenance of foreign language vocabulary and the spacing effect. Psychological Science, 4(5), 316-321.
• Kornell, N. (2009). Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(9), 1297-1317.
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58.

Short Daily Practice in AlphaGeorge

AlphaGeorge, which I make for iPhone and iPad, is an app for Cambridge English exam preparation. The course has six levels from A1 to C2 and 66 units in all, and the A2 to C2 levels are aimed at KET through CPE. It is made for short gaps in the day, such as a commute or a wait.

The Warm-up on the home screen is a session of about five minutes once a day, with five dictation and shadowing questions. The Vocabulary and Conversation Phrases quick drills give short practice without opening the course. You can stamp the calendar on days you finish studying, and reminder notifications can be turned on and timed for each day of the week.

AlphaGeorge is free to start, with ads and a limit of hearts. AlphaGeorge Premium, a monthly or yearly subscription, removes ads, makes hearts unlimited and lets you replay finished lessons. More on keeping a daily routine is in AlphaGeorge Tips.