At first glance, professors like this one come across as over-zealous killjoys who are so obsessed with their pet subject that they cannot imagine anyone taking a break from it. While it is true that professors really like their subjects and spend a weird amount of time thinking about those subjects (...as I type out a psychology blog during my Spring Break...) most of us do not think that our students feel the same way. So why the homework over Spring Break?
Think about what you learn in a college class. It is a. lot. of. information. In fact, a 2006 review by Proctor and Williams found more than 400 terms that are common across most Introduction to Psychology textbooks (see Further Readings for this list). Even in a basic psychology class you are asked to remember a lot! And for right or wrong, both professors and students use exam grades to determine how much the class remembers: high scores mean that they remembered a lot.
So why would it matter if a student takes eleven days off from studying then comes back from Spring Break to take an exam?
It goes back to an idea that Hermann Ebbinghaus wrote about in 1885: you remember more after having several practice sessions than you would by just having one big practice. Today we would say that distributed practice allows you to remember more than massed practice. So you will remember more and do better on tests if you practice the material on more than one day; it also means that you will not remember as much if you just try to learn the material during one long practice session. This memory boost from distributed practice is noticeable when there is some time that passes between the last practice and when the material is tested.
How much time should go in between each of these practice sessions depends on how long it will be until that information is tested. For example, in a study done by Küpper-Tetzel, Kaper, and Wiseheart (2014), German school children did better on vocabulary tests if they practiced the words on two days, with a one day break in between, and then took the exam seven days later. Interestingly, the break in between the two practices had to be longer (eleven days instead of two) if the exam would occur 35 days after the second practice.
So your professors want you to succeed and part of that success is to remember the course material. If you remember the course material you will do better on exams - something that most students want. Practicing the material in class and then practicing material at home creates distributed practice.
The Küpper-Tetzel et al. study might suggest that if my college students have 11 days between our last class and the test, they would be making a smart choice to study on day two, take a day off, study again on day four, and then take the remaining seven days off to enjoy themselves before taking the exam. That would be a better method than doing one big marathon study session on day four before taking those same seven days off before the test.
Now if you are reading this too late to use distributed practice, there still may be hope for you! Cramming, which is really an example of massed practice, does increase memory if you are tested right after the cramming session. So my students might also find success if they spend the entire day before the exam practicing the material over and over. The only problem (beside lack of sleep and caffeine abuse) is that this sort of massed practice does not work for long-term learning. If you want to remember material beyond one exam it is much better to stick to distributed practice!
And, if you don't want to remember the material - don't practice it at all!
Further Reading:
If you would like more study tips based on psychological research, the American Psychological Association's graduate student magazine offers this article.
Here is the Proctor and Williams (2006) list of terms that are common in Introduction to Psychology textbooks. It is a paper from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology's (APA Division 2) Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology. Derrick Proctor and Alisa Williams are affiliated with Andrews University in Michigan.
A draft of the Küpper-Tetzel et al. study, "Contracting, equal, and expanding learning schedules: The optimal distribution of learning sessions depends on retention interval," can be viewed on Dr. Küpper-Tetzel's webpage. The published journal article can be accessed at your local university library.
Die-hard history of psychology fans can read more about Ebbinghaus' original thoughts on repetition and memory on Christopher Green's website archive: Classics in the History of Psychology.
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