Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbaumb here with a classic episode from the podcast's archives.
Speaker 1: In this one, we dive into the weird science of learning.
Speaker 1: We all know somewhere in our heart of hearts that
Speaker 1: pulling all nighters to cram isn't really effective, especially in
Speaker 1: the long term. But let's talk about what actually is.
Speaker 2: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogelbomb here with a familiar scenario.
Speaker 2: It's the day before a big calculus exam and you
Speaker 2: haven't studied for whatever reason.
Speaker 1: You're short on time.
Speaker 2: You have too many other exams packed into the same day,
Speaker 2: too many cat videos. You know. Around ten pm you
Speaker 2: finally sit down to review the material. Six hours later,
Speaker 2: you catch a short nap before rushing to school. You
Speaker 2: take the exam and it seems to go fine, although
Speaker 2: it wasn't your best effort. You pass and promise not
Speaker 2: to repeat the cycle when it's time for your next one.
Speaker 2: This is what's known as cramming, and while students, parents
Speaker 2: and educators have long known it's not ideal in desperate circumstances,
Speaker 2: it does work to some degree, and by some degree
Speaker 2: we mean it might save your GPA, but cramming doesn't
Speaker 2: provide long term learning. According to researchers who study how
Speaker 2: we learn versus how we think we learn a spoiler alert,
Speaker 2: we're usually really wrong. In the case of cramming, you
Speaker 2: may pass the test and feel like you've got the
Speaker 2: material down, but research shows that a dramatic rate of
Speaker 2: forgetting occurs afterwards. This is especially problematic when one lesson
Speaker 2: provides foundational information for the next like in math or
Speaker 2: a language class. Forgetting most of what you learned is
Speaker 2: not the only downside to cramming. Researchers have found that
Speaker 2: losing sleep while pulling an all nighter also leads to
Speaker 2: residual academic problems for days after the cramming session. You
Speaker 2: can imagine the negative effects of an ongoing cycle of
Speaker 2: procrastination and cramming. More than a century of research shows
Speaker 2: that if you study something twice, retention goes up. Studying
Speaker 2: and then waiting before you study more produces even better
Speaker 2: long term memory.
Speaker 1: This is called the spacing effect.
Speaker 2: Rather than reviewing material right away, students benefit from spacing
Speaker 2: out their study sessions. There are many arguments about why
Speaker 2: spacing works better for long time retention. One relates to encoding.
Speaker 2: When a student studies something from a book and reviews
Speaker 2: it immediately, the student will encode the information in the
Speaker 2: same way both times. It's not very helpful long term.
Speaker 2: The more different times and ways you can encode information,
Speaker 2: the better you'll understand it and the longer you'll know it.
Speaker 2: This means that even studying the same material in two
Speaker 2: different locations can help you encode it in different ways,
Speaker 2: Therefore you'll learn it more successfully. Another factor at work
Speaker 2: is that research shows that the harder it is for
Speaker 2: a brain to recall something, the more powerful the effects
Speaker 2: of that recall will be in the long term. For example,
Speaker 2: if you're at a conference and meet someone new, you
Speaker 2: might recall their name immediately, which probably won't help you.
Speaker 1: Remember it the next day.
Speaker 2: However, if you need to recall the person's name an
Speaker 2: hour into the conference and do so, you'll have a
Speaker 2: better chance of remembering it a day or a week
Speaker 2: later because you had to put in the effort to
Speaker 2: recall it. A third reason why spacing works is that
Speaker 2: people pay less attention to the second presentation of material
Speaker 2: that they've just seen because the information is already familiar.
Speaker 2: When the material is spaced out, it's no longer as familiar,
Speaker 2: so people pay more attention if the spacing effect sounds
Speaker 2: like a lot of waiting around to review material, and
Speaker 2: it may indeed slow the learning process because you'll be
Speaker 2: studying for more than one evening. Recent studies have shown
Speaker 2: the positive effects of another study method, mixing up different
Speaker 2: material while studying. This concept, called interleaving, consists of working
Speaker 2: on or studying one skill for a short period of time,
Speaker 2: then switching to another one, then maybe a third, then
Speaker 2: back to the first. A twenty fifteen study tested interleaving
Speaker 2: in nine middle school classrooms teaching algebra and geometry. A
Speaker 2: day after the lesson for the unit was complete, the
Speaker 2: students trained with interleaving school were twenty five percent better
Speaker 2: than the students who received standard training. A month later,
Speaker 2: the interleaving group was up seventy six percent. This is
Speaker 2: great news. Studying for an exam or completing a big
Speaker 2: project doesn't need to feel so daunting, and interleaving has
Speaker 2: benefits for writing, too. Rather than trying to block out
Speaker 2: two hours to study for a math test, study math
Speaker 2: for thirty minutes before you move on to French, and
Speaker 2: then work on an essay go back to the math later.
Speaker 2: There's a message here for teachers as well as students.
Speaker 2: Instead of teaching a topic and a block and going
Speaker 2: to the next steps, teachers can spend a short time
Speaker 2: on a topic, go on to others, then return to
Speaker 2: the earlier topics. But it seems that we have a
Speaker 2: lot to learn about how we learn. A two thousand
Speaker 2: and nine study from UCLA found that spacing was more
Speaker 2: effective than cramming for ninety percent of the participants. Just
Speaker 2: six percent of those who crammed learned more than those
Speaker 2: who studied using the spacing effect. In three experiments, researchers
Speaker 2: tested spacing against cramming, Yet despite the findings in favor
Speaker 2: of spacing, participants believed the cramming style was more effective,
Speaker 2: and a twenty twelve UCLA study found that staying up
Speaker 2: and foregoing sleep to study is actually counterproductive. No matter
Speaker 2: how much a student studies daily, if they sacrifice sleep
Speaker 2: in order to study more, they're likely to have more
Speaker 2: academic problems, not less the next day. Today's episode is
Speaker 2: based on the article why cramming is the worst way
Speaker 2: to study on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Kerry Whitney.
Speaker 2: Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with houstuffworks
Speaker 2: dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
Speaker 2: podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the Airheartradio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.