Lessons · Teaching · spaced practice
Spacing: the same minutes, further apart
The same total practice time produces far more durable memory when it is cut up and spread out than when it is done in one block.
Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.
What it is for
You have been answering one question a day here rather than forty in one evening, and things you met in week one are still there in week six. That is not because the questions were easy. It is because they were spread, and your own six weeks are the cleanest evidence for this you will ever be handed. The same rule is why cramming a class the night before a unit test buys you the test and nothing after it.
How to think about it
Decide the total practice minutes first, then cut them into small visits and space the visits with gaps that grow: a day, then a few days, then a week, then a month. The question is never whether to practise but how to cut it up.
Worked example
Total practice for this objective: 30 minDecided first, before any scheduling.
Blocked: 30 min on TuesdayOne sitting. Feels productive, and most of it is gone by the following Tuesday.
Spaced: 6 min on days 1, 3, 8, 22 and 45Five visits, the same thirty minutes, gaps that grow.
Gaps: 2 days, 5 days, 14 days, 23 daysEach gap longer than the last. The gap does the work, not the minutes.
Your turn
A teacher has 24 minutes of practice for one objective and wants four spaced visits of equal length. Write the line that gives one visit.
24 min / 4 visits = min per visit
Solve one, graded on the server
The trap
Spacing the teaching instead of the practice. The lesson still happens once; it is the retrieval that is spread out. A unit taught in fragments with no return visits is just a confusing unit.