April 5, 2019 • 5 mins
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 episode of BrainStuff.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren vog obam here with a familiar scenario. It's the
day before a big calculus exam and you haven't studied
for whatever reason. You're short on time, you have too
many other exams packed into the same day, too many
cat videos. You know. Around ten pm you finally sit
(00:22):
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. This
is what's known as cramming, and while students, parents and
educators have long known it's not ideal in desperate circumstances,
(00:43):
it does work to some degree. And by some degree
we mean it might save your g p A. 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, we're usually really wrong in the use
of cramming. You may pass the test and feel like
you've got the material down, but research shows that a
(01:05):
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 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
(01:27):
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 long term memory. This is called the
spacing effect. Rather than reviewing material right away, students benefit
from spacing out their study sessions. There are many arguments
(01:50):
about why spacing works better for a long time retention.
One relates to encoding. When a student studies something from
a book and reviews it immediately, the student will encode
the infra nation in the same way both times. That's
not very helpful long term. 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
(02:12):
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 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,
(02:33):
which probably won't help you remember it the next day. 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
(02:55):
material is spaced out, it's no longer is familiar, 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
(03:18):
or studying one skill for a short period of time,
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 scored better than the students who
received standard training. A month later, the interleaving group was
(03:41):
up seventy six. This is 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
(04:02):
for teachers as well as students. 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 nine study from u
c l A found that spacing was more effective than
cramming for the participants. Just six percent of those who
(04:24):
crammed learned more than those who studied using the spacing effect.
In three experiments, researchers tested spacing against cramming. Yet despite
the findings in favor of spacing, participants believed that the
cramming style was more effective. And U c l A
study found that staying up and foregoing sleep to study
is actually counterproductive. No matter how much a student studies daily,
(04:47):
if they sacrifice sleep in order to study more, they're
likely to have more academic problems, not less the next day.
Today's episode was written by Carrie at n E, pH
d and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a
production of iHeartMedia's How Stuff Works. For more on this
and lots of other studious topics, visit our home planet,
(05:08):
how stuff Works dot com. And for more podcasts. For
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren vog obam here with a familiar scenario. It's the
day before a big calculus exam and you haven't studied
for whatever reason. You're short on time, you have too
many other exams packed into the same day, too many
cat videos. You know. Around ten pm you finally sit
(00:22):
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. This
is what's known as cramming, and while students, parents and
educators have long known it's not ideal in desperate circumstances,
(00:43):
it does work to some degree. And by some degree
we mean it might save your g p A. 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, we're usually really wrong in the use
of cramming. You may pass the test and feel like
you've got the material down, but research shows that a
(01:05):
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 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
(01:27):
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 long term memory. This is called the
spacing effect. Rather than reviewing material right away, students benefit
from spacing out their study sessions. There are many arguments
(01:50):
about why spacing works better for a long time retention.
One relates to encoding. When a student studies something from
a book and reviews it immediately, the student will encode
the infra nation in the same way both times. That's
not very helpful long term. 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
(02:12):
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 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,
(02:33):
which probably won't help you remember it the next day. 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
(02:55):
material is spaced out, it's no longer is familiar, 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
(03:18):
or studying one skill for a short period of time,
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 scored better than the students who
received standard training. A month later, the interleaving group was
(03:41):
up seventy six. This is 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
(04:02):
for teachers as well as students. 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 nine study from u
c l A found that spacing was more effective than
cramming for the participants. Just six percent of those who
(04:24):
crammed learned more than those who studied using the spacing effect.
In three experiments, researchers tested spacing against cramming. Yet despite
the findings in favor of spacing, participants believed that the
cramming style was more effective. And U c l A
study found that staying up and foregoing sleep to study
is actually counterproductive. No matter how much a student studies daily,
(04:47):
if they sacrifice sleep in order to study more, they're
likely to have more academic problems, not less the next day.
Today's episode was written by Carrie at n E, pH
d and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a
production of iHeartMedia's How Stuff Works. For more on this
and lots of other studious topics, visit our home planet,
(05:08):
how stuff Works dot com. And for more podcasts. For
my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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