BrainStuff Classics: Why Is Cramming the Worst Way to Study?

Cramming for a test or other deadline may give you decent short-term results, but research shows it sacrifices long-term comprehension and memory. Learn why study methods like spacing and interleaving are better in this classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/why-cramming-is-worst-way-to-study.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hey brain Stuff.

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Lauren vogelbaumb here with a classic episode from the podcast's archives.
In this one, we dive into the weird science of learning.
We all know somewhere in our heart of hearts that
pulling all nighters to cram isn't really effective, especially in
the long term. But let's talk about what actually is.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogelbomb here with a familiar scenario.
It's the day before a big calculus exam and you
haven't studied for whatever reason.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
You're short on time.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
You have too many other exams packed into the same day,
too many cat videos. You know. Around ten pm you
finally sit down to review the material. Six hours later,
you catch a short nap before rushing to school. You
take the exam and it seems to go fine, although
it wasn't your best effort. You pass and promise not
to repeat the cycle when it's time for your next one.

(01:00):
This is what's known as cramming, and while students, parents
and educators have long known it's not ideal in desperate circumstances,
it does work to some degree, and by some degree
we mean it might save your GPA, but cramming doesn't
provide long term learning. According to researchers who study how
we learn versus how we think we learn a spoiler alert,

(01:21):
we're usually really wrong. In the case of cramming, you
may pass the test and feel like you've got the
material down, but research shows that a dramatic rate of
forgetting occurs afterwards. This is especially problematic when one lesson
provides foundational information for the next like in math or
a language class. Forgetting most of what you learned is
not the only downside to cramming. Researchers have found that

(01:43):
losing sleep while pulling an all nighter also leads to
residual academic problems for days after the cramming session. You
can imagine the negative effects of an ongoing cycle of
procrastination and cramming. More than a century of research shows
that if you study something twice, retention goes up. Studying
and then waiting before you study more produces even better

(02:04):
long term memory.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
This is called the spacing effect.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Rather than reviewing material right away, students benefit from spacing
out their study sessions. There are many arguments about why
spacing works better for long time retention. One relates to encoding.
When a student studies something from a book and reviews
it immediately, the student will encode the information in the
same way both times. It's not very helpful long term.

(02:28):
The more different times and ways you can encode information,
the better you'll understand it and the longer you'll know it.
This means that even studying the same material in two
different locations can help you encode it in different ways,
Therefore you'll learn it more successfully. Another factor at work
is that research shows that the harder it is for
a brain to recall something, the more powerful the effects

(02:50):
of that recall will be in the long term. For example,
if you're at a conference and meet someone new, you
might recall their name immediately, which probably won't help you.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Remember it the next day.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
However, if you need to recall the person's name an
hour into the conference and do so, you'll have a
better chance of remembering it a day or a week
later because you had to put in the effort to
recall it. A third reason why spacing works is that
people pay less attention to the second presentation of material
that they've just seen because the information is already familiar.
When the material is spaced out, it's no longer as familiar,

(03:22):
so people pay more attention if the spacing effect sounds
like a lot of waiting around to review material, and
it may indeed slow the learning process because you'll be
studying for more than one evening. Recent studies have shown
the positive effects of another study method, mixing up different
material while studying. This concept, called interleaving, consists of working
on or studying one skill for a short period of time,

(03:45):
then switching to another one, then maybe a third, then
back to the first. A twenty fifteen study tested interleaving
in nine middle school classrooms teaching algebra and geometry. A
day after the lesson for the unit was complete, the
students trained with interleaving school were twenty five percent better
than the students who received standard training. A month later,
the interleaving group was up seventy six percent. This is

(04:08):
great news. Studying for an exam or completing a big
project doesn't need to feel so daunting, and interleaving has
benefits for writing, too. Rather than trying to block out
two hours to study for a math test, study math
for thirty minutes before you move on to French, and
then work on an essay go back to the math later.
There's a message here for teachers as well as students.

(04:28):
Instead of teaching a topic and a block and going
to the next steps, teachers can spend a short time
on a topic, go on to others, then return to
the earlier topics. But it seems that we have a
lot to learn about how we learn. A two thousand
and nine study from UCLA found that spacing was more
effective than cramming for ninety percent of the participants. Just
six percent of those who crammed learned more than those

(04:50):
who studied using the spacing effect. In three experiments, researchers
tested spacing against cramming, Yet despite the findings in favor
of spacing, participants believed the cramming style was more effective,
and a twenty twelve UCLA study found that staying up
and foregoing sleep to study is actually counterproductive. No matter
how much a student studies daily, if they sacrifice sleep

(05:12):
in order to study more, they're likely to have more
academic problems, not less the next day. Today's episode is
based on the article why cramming is the worst way
to study on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Kerry Whitney.
Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with houstuffworks

(05:34):
dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit the Airheartradio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.