2 Ways to Boost Retention: Interleaving and Spaced Repetition
There are two other things that really help with retention: Interleaving and Spaced Repetition!
Interleaving is about going back and forth between ideas to keep them fresh in your mind!
Spaced Repetition is about constantly going aback and reviewing what’s already been taught!
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How to Remember What You Learn: Interleaving
There are two other things that really help with retention. One is Interleaving and the other is Spaced Repetition. We try to use these whenever we’re teaching.
Interleaving
Interleaving is the idea that, if I’m going to teach you algebra and geometry, I shouldn’t teach you everything you need to know about algebra, stop, and then teach you everything you need to know about geometry. Because you will just throw out the algebra to make room for the geometry. So what I want to do is to teach you a little bit of algebra, then teach you a little bit of geometry, then go back to teaching you a little bit of algebra, and then a little bit of geometry.
Here’s why: your brain takes a certain amount of power to get set up to receive a kind of information (a specific subject). It has to pull all of the information that it previously knew about this subject, so it wants to call everything it knows about algebra every time I’m teaching you something about algebra.
That act of calling and retrieving helps to concretize what you’re learning in your memory and make it stronger. So if I do that over and over, now you’ve concretized algebra a whole bunch of times, and geometry a whole bunch of times, and you’re always making the critical distinction: “Do I need to use algebra or do I need to use geometry?”
Spaced Repetition
Similarly, a couple of researches did the same thing with a bean bag toss (they had a three-foot bean bag toss) and they had one group practice, x number of times, chucking the bean bag at a distance of three feet, and they had the other group practice at distances of two feet and four feet, but never at 3. The two groups worked an equal amount of time, but in the end, the people who had worked with the two-foot and the four-foot bean bag toss (and had never worked with the three-foot bean bag toss) were significantly more accurate with the three-foot bean bag toss.
Why? Because they were constantly making judgements about how far they had to throw the bean bag. That is the exact thing that happens with your kids when they’re learning disparate, unlinked information. They’re going “Oh, wait, what is the decision I have to make? Oh, this is connected to that thing? Ok, great!”. And so that cements what they’re learning more firmly than it otherwise would.
That’s one of the hallmarks of retention and that is what we as teachers have to think about all the time when we’re introducing information, laying out concepts, and going back to repeat things. That’s Spaced Repetition!
Stay tuned for more tips on increasing retention! For more studying and test-prep tips, check out our blog: https://www.socraticsummeracademy.com/blog.
