With the amount of new information students learn every day, it can be difficult to remember and understand it all. The first step to success is making sure your child develops the most effective study skills.
One of the most effective learning techniques that students of all ages can use is something called spatial practice.
What is spaced practice?
Spaced practice is a learning technique in which students review material over an extended period of time. This gives them time to make connections between ideas and concepts so that knowledge can be built upon and easily recalled later.
Understanding the Spaced Practice Method
Before you understand how the Spaced Practice Method works, there is another important part of the equation: the forgetting curve.
The forgetting curve shows how much knowledge is lost over time if our brain doesn’t make an effort to remember it. It’s not enough to learn something just once. Your child needs to revisit and repeat the material over and over again to really retain it. If your child doesn’t work to repeat what he or she has learned, most of the material will be forgotten within a few days or weeks.
This is where regular practice comes into play.
How does spaced practice work?
The purpose of the spaced repetition method is to give your child the opportunity to (almost) forget the material before they pick it up again. It sounds the other way around, but it’s actually important to forget in order to remember!
When our brain almost forgets something, it has to work harder to recall the information. Staggered learning exercises your child’s brain each time he or she revisits the material.
When your kid is taking part in a cram session, all the facts are confined to his/her short-term memory (and are swiftly forgotten). On the other hand, when your kid is employing spaced learning, the material gets saved in his/her long-term memory. This is why spaced learning succeeds. Eventually, your child won’t need to strive to recall – they will be able to access the knowledge without difficulty from their long-term memory. At the start, their brain will be straining to recollect the content. As they come back to the material, it will become easier to memorize and build upon. Making a study plan for spaced repetition can help your child to retain what he/she has learned and this will prepare them to construct on the information they have learned so that your child has a reliable base for tests and future learning.
Review sessions should be short and frequent.
Making review meetings brief yet frequent is a way to implement spaced learning. It is much more effective than having sporadic long study sessions. It should be a continuous activity throughout the year and not only performed when an upcoming test is near. Additionally, it is important to spend time on the material over a longer period of time, as opposed to trying to learn everything at once. Divide the material into topics and tackle each one every few weeks, with longer periods of time in between each session that focuses on a specific topic.
If your kid is starting a novel unit in science class, devote a session to it and return the next day to review it. Afterward, wait three days and analyze again. This routine may be dissimilar for every learner, but a typical distributed repetition schedule might look like this: Day 1: Initial study session; Day 2: Review and Re-examine; Day 5: Review and Re-examine; Day 8: Review and Re-examine; Day 15: Review and Re-examine. It is essential to look into old material first. As your child studies the latest class information, make sure they go back and look into significant old stuff to keep it fresh. With spaced practice, it is actually better to forget a bit. To make studying effective, your child needs to study, almost forget, and then study again. The purpose is to make the brain work to recall what was studied in the previous session. If the brain has to work harder to remember past material, your child will store it more efficiently in the future.
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Incorporate old knowledge with fresh information.
Encourage your child to consider how the material they are repeating and inspecting relates to new topics they are studying. You can help your child remember past material and incorporate new information by creating summaries and checklists during study sessions. With repetition and practice of these study techniques, your child will be able to form a strong basis for their academic performance.
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