Spacing out vocabulary study

Introduction: Students often wonder whether it matters how they divide up their study time. In this study, researchers compared studying new vocabulary in one long session with studying the same words in several shorter sessions spread across a week.

Participants: Ninety-six tenth-grade students (51 girls and 45 boys, aged 15 and 16) enrolled in first-year Spanish at two public high schools in one suburban school district took part. None had studied Spanish before high school. Parents reported their children's race/ethnicity as 58% White, 22% Hispanic or Latino, 11% Asian, 6% Black and 3% multiracial.

Method: The school district and a university institutional review board approved the study. Parents gave written informed consent, and each student gave assent. Students were told that their scores would not count toward their grades and would not be shared with their teachers. A computer program randomly assigned each student to one of two conditions. In both conditions, students studied the same 30 new Spanish words in a flashcard app for a total of 60 minutes.

Massed condition (48 students): one 60-minute session on a Friday.

Spaced condition (48 students): three 20-minute sessions, on the Monday, Wednesday and Friday of the same week.

Exactly one week after the final study session, all students took the same test: for each of the 30 English words, they typed the Spanish word. Graders who did not know which condition each student was in scored the tests. Each student's score was the number of Spanish words, out of 30, typed correctly.

Results and Discussion: The table shows the results. The difference between the conditions was statistically significant (p < .001). In a survey taken just before the test, 60% of students in the massed condition said they expected to do 'very well,' compared with 44% in the spaced condition.