Thirty years ago, Frank N. Dempster wrote an article entitled “A Case Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research” (1). His case study was the spacing effect – the finding that studying information presented spaced out over time is more effective for learning than is studying the same information in massed study sessions. In this article, Dempster outlined 9 possible reasons why the spacing effect might not have become mainstream practice, particularly in American classrooms (he does mention that other countries, such as Russia, had embraced this practice more readily – a statement I can anecdotally confirm from my Russian childhood). I thought it might be interesting to revisit this article today (i.e., 30 years later), and see how many of these reasons for failure to adopt the spacing effect still apply.
Source: The Failed Spacing Effect 30 Years Later (Part 1) – The Learning Scientists Blog
