Spaced practice

Dr John Mahoney
Learning Design
10
 m
UKPSF Dimensions

Teach and/or support learning

How students learn, both generally and within their subject/disciplinary area(s)

What can I do?

Impact
4
Quality
3
  • Revisit concepts, procedures, and skills after a delay and across the teaching period rather than teaching them once and moving on
  • Include a small number of previous topics in quizzes, workshops, tutorials, case discussions or revision tasks so students repeatedly retrieve and use earlier learning
  • Don't simply expose students to previous content, engage them in recalling it through active and applied tasks

What is this about?

Spaced practice means spreading learning opportunities over time instead of concentrating them into one block. In a unit, this might mean returning to a key concept in Weeks 2, 4, 7 and 10, adding previous-topic questions to weekly quizzes, or asking students to use an earlier framework in a later case. This is different from simply telling students to “revise”. Spacing is a design choice. It means building repeated, delayed opportunities for students to retrieve and use important knowledge before they need it in assessment or professional practice.

What's the evidence say?

Spaced practice improves learning compared with massed practice. Mawson and Kang (2025), in their classroom-focused meta-analysis, found a moderate benefit for distributed over massed practice, with students in distributed-practice conditions performing about half a standard deviation higher than those in massed-practice conditions.

A broader meta-analysis of learning techniques by Donoghue and Hattie (2021) found distributed practice to be one of the strongest strategies, with a large effect overall and similarly strong effects in university samples. However, this evidence base is less directly about higher-education course design because many studies focused on surface knowledge, near transfer, or short-term outcomes.

Spacing appears especially useful when students are asked to retrieve information over time. Latimier et al. (2021) found that spaced retrieval practice produced better retention than massed retrieval practice, but found little evidence that expanding schedules are better than simpler uniform schedules. This means academics do not need a complicated spacing algorithm to start. The main step is to revisit important content after a delay.

The evidence from authentic higher-education classrooms is promising but more mixed. In nine introductory STEM courses, Bego et al. (2024) found that spaced retrieval practice produced a small overall improvement, but effects varied substantially across courses and were not clearly generalisable. Possible reasons include differences in subject matter, feedback, question type, student study habits and how strongly students learned the material in the first place.

In mathematics, spaced practice has a small-to-medium positive effect (Murray et al., 2025). The effect appears larger in controlled isolated-learning studies and smaller, though still positive, when practice is embedded into real courses. Evidence for retrieval practice versus restudy in mathematics is currently inconclusive.

What's the underlying theory?

Spaced practice is grounded in research on memory and forgetting. Students often feel fluent immediately after learning something, but that fluency fades. Delaying the next practice attempt makes retrieval more effortful, and that effort can strengthen later retention. This is why spacing is often described as a desirable difficulty: it may feel harder during practice but produce stronger long-term learning.

Several mechanisms may explain the spacing effect. Study-phase retrieval suggests that later practice works partly because students must retrieve the earlier learning episode. Deficient processing suggests that massed repetition can lead students to process repeated material shallowly because it feels familiar. Encoding variability suggests that learning something across different times and contexts gives students more retrieval cues later. Murray et al. (2025) describe these as complementary rather than mutually exclusive explanations.

Where does the evidence come from?

This summary is based on five meta-analytic or meta-analytic-style papers. The strongest classroom anchor is Mawson and Kang’s review of distributed practice in classroom learning. Donoghue and Hattie provide broader evidence across learning techniques. Latimier et al. focus on spaced retrieval practice. Murray et al. provide subject-specific evidence for mathematics learning. Bego et al. provide an important higher-education STEM implementation study showing that effects in authentic courses are promising but variable.

References

Bego, C. R., Lyle, K. B., Ralston, P. A. S., Immekus, J. C., Chastain, R. J., Haynes, L. D., Hoyt, L. K., Pigg, R. M., Rabin, S. R., Scobee, M. W., & Starr, T. L. (2024). Single-paper meta-analyses of the effects of spaced retrieval practice in nine introductory STEM courses: Is the glass half full or half empty? International Journal of STEM Education, 11, Article 9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-024-00468-5

Donoghue, G. M., & Hattie, J. A. C. (2021). A meta-analysis of ten learning techniques. Frontiers in Education, 6, Article 581216. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.581216

Latimier, A., Peyre, H., & Ramus, F. (2021). A meta-analytic review of the benefit of spacing out retrieval practice episodes on retention. Educational Psychology Review, 33, 959–987. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09572-8

Mawson, R. D., & Kang, S. H. K. (2025). The distributed practice effect on classroom learning: A meta-analytic review of applied research. Behavioral Sciences, 15(6), Article 771. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15060771

Murray, E., Horner, A. J., & Göbel, S. M. (2025). A meta-analytic review of the effectiveness of spacing and retrieval practice for mathematics learning. Educational Psychology Review, 37, Article 75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-025-10035-1‍

Additional Resources

Dr John Mahoney

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