Spaced Repetition: The Most Effective Study Technique
Imagine spending five hours studying for an exam, only to forget nearly everything a week later. Unfortunately, this experience is familiar to millions of students, professionals, and lifelong learners. The problem is often not intelligence or motivation. The problem is the way information is reviewed. Modern neuroscience has shown that memory is not strengthened by simply reading the same material repeatedly in one sitting. Instead, one of the most powerful learning strategies ever discovered is surprisingly simple: Review information just before you're about to forget it. This method is called spaced repetition . For more than a century, psychologists and neuroscientists have studied how spacing reviews over time dramatically improves long-term memory while reducing the total amount of study time required. Today, spaced repetition is used by medical students, language learners, pilots, scientists, musicians, and many of the world's highest-performing lea...