Optimising retention through multiple study opportunities over days: The benefit of an expanding schedule of repetitions

Abstract

Few studies have investigated how scheduling repeated studies of the same material over several days influences its subsequent retention. The study-phase retrieval hypothesis predicts that, under these circumstances, expanding intervals between repetitions will promote the greatest likelihood that the participant will be reminded of previous occurrences of the item, thus leading to a benefit for subsequent recall. In the present article, participants studied vocabulary pairs that were repeated according to one of three schedules. In the expanding schedule, pairs were presented on days 1, 2 and 13; in the uniform schedule, on days 1, 7 and 13; and in the contracting schedule, on days 1, 12 and 13. Cued-recall was assessed after a retention interval (RI) of 2, 6 or 13 days. Consistent with predictions, the expanding schedule generally led to better performance than the other schedules. However, further analyses suggested that the benefit of an expanding schedule may be greater when the RI is longer.

Keywords:

• Distributed practice
• Spacing effect
• Long-term retention
• Expanding schedule
• Repetition

The authors wish to thank Climats Medias for providing financial support to compensate the participants who took part in the present experiments.

The authors wish to thank Climats Medias for providing financial support to compensate the participants who took part in the present experiments.

Notes

¹ Although Clark (1928) did not report statistics, she reported all of her data which we submitted to 2 (duration of study sessions) × 2 (schedule) ANOVA with repeated measures on both factors. Results indicated a marginally significant effect of study duration, F(1, 31) = 3.891, MSE = 254.452, p = .058, while the main effect of schedule and the interaction failed to approach significance, both Fs(1, 31) < 1.0.

² Two participants in the 13-day-RI condition had to be eliminated from these analyses because they failed to recall anything on the final test. It should be noted, however, that the outcomes of previously reported analyses were unchanged when these participants also were excluded from those analyses.