A Comparative Analysis of Massed vs. Distributed Practice: Psychology

This report examines the effects of massed versus distributed practice on learning and memory retention, drawing on two key research articles. The introduction defines these learning strategies, highlighting the differences between studying information in one session (massed practice) and spacing out study sessions over time (distributed practice). The report then details two experiments exploring these strategies, including participant selection, materials, and procedures. Experiment 1 assesses the impact of massed versus distributed practice on solving permutation problems, while Experiment 2 investigates the effects of overlearning and distributed practice on mathematical knowledge retention. The results section presents the findings from both experiments, showing that distributed practice led to better long-term retention compared to massed practice and overlearning. The discussion section interprets these findings, emphasizing the importance of consistent practice and the benefits of spaced learning. Finally, the report concludes with recommendations for incorporating distributed practice into educational settings.

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Abstract
The primary analysis is an educational and experimental case study between major learning
strategies and its effectiveness for the students for learning mathematics. The strategies have
been discussed and defined in the introduction part. The following segment contains method
of the case experiment to be used for this study, which involved selected participants and
materials. The results were derived and summarized in the next segment which is based on
the findings of the experiments. In the final part, a discussion has been given to elaborate the
findings, the reasons behind it along with a general idea of a suitable technique.
The second analysis mainly concludes the effects of space in education settings and how
does it enhance memory retention. The introduction studies with the effects and the body
explain how we are concluding the research and the conclusion consists of
recommendations that will be incorporated in the daily procedure.

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Table of Contents
Introduction..............................................................................................................................5
The Effects of Overlearning and Distributed Practice on the Retention of Mathematics
Knowledge.................................................................................................................................7
Method...................................................................................................................................7
Exp. 1.........................................................................................................................................7
Participants.............................................................................................................................7
Material..................................................................................................................................7
Procedure................................................................................................................................7
Exp. 2.........................................................................................................................................7
Participants.............................................................................................................................7
Material..................................................................................................................................7
Procedure................................................................................................................................8
Result.........................................................................................................................................8
Experiment 1..........................................................................................................................8
Experiment 2..........................................................................................................................8
Discussion..................................................................................................................................9
Using spacing to enhance diverse forms of learning: Review of recent research and
implications for instruction...................................................................................................10
Method:................................................................................................................................10
Experiment 1...........................................................................................................................10
Result....................................................................................................................................10

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Experiment 2...........................................................................................................................10
Result....................................................................................................................................10
Discussion................................................................................................................................11
Recommendation....................................................................................................................11
Conclusion...............................................................................................................................12
References...............................................................................................................................13

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Introduction
We have many mental abilities as human beings and learning is counted one of them.
We learn many subjects and information at school or college, but in most cases it is forgotten
within weeks or in days. Thus true purpose behind learning fails when a person forgets the
material they had learned. So strategies for learning was needed, their effectiveness and result
can be judged by a student’s performance after learning certain material. The findings are
done in several parts based on the performance by criteria marking, and an interval of
retention for non-trivial purposes (Casey, Carroll, & Crowley, 2018). Students are judged
and examined by their memory of the knowledge material, and performance with a provided
break. In this report, two strategies are specifically chosen for mathematical knowledge
learning. One is distributed practice and the other is overlearning. When knowledge or a
lesson or a chapter is divided into different time slots and into different days with specific
time period multiple times, it is known as distributed learning. For instance, a student has
learned a certain mathematics procedure or chapter of solving in school. Now either the
equivalent mathematics questions related and based on the same solving procedure will be
distributed into several assignments and weeks by the teacher or the teacher can go for
massed practice. The mathematics textbook prepares the lessons in such a way that massed
practice seems more accurate or valid. The strategy of learning provides the ultimate result of
mastering the knowledge and it will never be forgotten fully from the mind (Rohrer et al.,
2019). For distributed practice, the student learns the material and then keeps on practicing
the same material for weeks to master the procedure. On the other hand, knowledge learning
can be massed into one day. For this, the student has to learn the mathematics solving process
and then keep repeating it for the corresponding mathematics solution over and over, until he
masters it. In an overlearning strategy, a student is supposed to master the process at first by
solving the problems given in the practice exercises and then repeating to practice the

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mastered skill to engrave it in mind. Although, overlearning does not mean that students can
only master their skills via this. A person can master a definite lesson without learning it
using the overlearning technique. Besides, these two techniques are genuinely different and
should not be compared as they do not complement each other (Wiseheart et al., 2019).
Also another practice that implies the massed process and distributed process is
spacing learning system. Students can learn different information or learning material massed
in one session or they can learn through a distributed system with spaces. Furthermore, some
research case studies are provided here to support the argument. We have observed that the
distributed learning process with spacing is more effective than the massed learning process.
On the ultimate memory examination, performance is often higher for things that were
spaced rather than amassed (Foloppe et al., 2018). this can be usually cited because of the
spacing result. Some studies have additionally reported that completely different| spacing
gaps lead to different degrees of learning, which has generally been cited because of the
lag result. as an example, learning of a given biology term could be higher once it's
perennial. When a comparatively long spacing gap (example, 5 min) compared to a
comparatively short spacing gap (example, 1 min). within the current paper, the term
spacing result during a general sense to confer with the various degrees of learning that
result as a function of various spacing gaps is being used (Markant et al., 2016). Early
demonstrations of this result was shown since hundreds of years past and many printed
studies have been published to advantages of spacing. whereas participants in most of
those studies were adult learners, the advantages of spacing have additionally been
dependably incontestable in studies with younger participants, as well as primary school
kids, Gymnasium kids, and educational institution kids as young as three or four years of
age. Furthermore, hereafter we are going to provide proper methods and its descriptions
and we will also describe the details of those methods too (Santos et al., 2016).

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The Effects of Overlearning and Distributed Practice on the Retention of Mathematics
Knowledge
Method
A method will be selected in this section which will take into account some cases to
provide a judgment on which strategy is necessarily better than the other. Two experiments
were conducted for this.
Exp. 1
Participants
50 undergraduate students were selected randomly for this study and they were
invited to be participant for the experiment. There were 40 women and 10 men amongst
them. They did not take part in the other experiments later.
Material
They were given single pieces of papers to each and a permutation problem has been
written on the papers. They were to find the number of permutations in the given series,
which were aaabbbb, aabbbcc, aaaabbb.
Procedure
The students were provided 3 minutes to solve these mathematics problems.
Exp. 2
Participants
For this session, 95 women and 21 men have been selected to perform the experiment
related tasks. The total number of participants was 116.
Material

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Four groups were formed for this, amongst which two groups were given one week of
retention interval after a learning class and the other two were given 4 weeks.
Procedure
The whole experiment was divided into three parts. In the first session, they were
handed five random mathematics problems. Afterward, they have not informed anything
about the upcoming sessions at all. So they were not supposed to know that anything is
coming as such. Therefore, it cannot be known whether they practiced within this interval
period (Kao et al., 2017). The next session was one week apart and the last one was four
weeks apart.
Result
Experiment 1
None of the students has been able to finish the problems. They have not even given
one correct answer in the least. Their papers did not seem like they knew what they were
doing. It is evident that most of them are not familiar with the concept of how to solve this
type of problem. Meanwhile, the rest only knew what permutation is and they wrote down
every other permutation sequences based on the given series. None of the participants were
informed beforehand or prior to the experimental task about they are going to do so that the
result is not impacted by any external aspect.
Experiment 2
Almost 67 percent of the attendees were able to solve all five questions combined all
three sessions. There were Mass practiced students with 1 and 4 weeks of time interval and
there were also the spacers with distributed learning technique with a similar time period
(Mazziotti et al., 2015). In the first sessions, all the groups had performed almost equally in
the test. In the next sessions, the massers acquired 88% over the spacers with 87%. The gap

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was very minimal. In the final week, the massers were ahead by 94% while the spacers
procured an average of 87%.
Discussion
In the initial experiment, the participants were not able to perform at all. This is
mainly due to random selection of students without knowing their learning techniques. The
students may not be bothered about learning these problems at all. Or it can be that they had
opted to learn the process of solving in the classroom but later did not pay any attention to the
follow-up practices. Thus, they forgot the material fully. In second experiment, the result is
vast as there were three parts with three outcomes (Van de Sande & Reiser, 2018). In the first
week, the students have just learned the solving procedure. So they remembered equally and
performed evenly as well. The second part is after 1 week, the massers were a little ahead as
they had practiced throughout the week. But the spacers only practiced in the classrooms and
assignments provided by the college. In the final week, the massers left the rest behind by a
great percentage as they had taken up the 4 weeks of time to practice the process and master
it. Meanwhile, the spacers had gotten detached with it as the class moved forward to another
mathematics segment. It is evident from the study that overlearning is not acceptable
technique for learning mathematics (Grawemeyer, 2015). One cannot learn a chapter and
practices it until she masters it and then moves forward. It needs consistency in practice. This
is why massed practice is better suitable for the students than distributed strategy.

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Using spacing to enhance diverse forms of learning: Review of recent research and
implications for instruction
Method:
the method is simple, there are two groups of people one is provided with some
elements or study materials that one group is studying in one session and the other group
is studying the session in different sessions spaced by some amount of time in between.
Experiment 1
A mildly abstract mathematics assignment was learned by college pupils. The job
needed learners to discover a series of items with at least one repeated element in the
number of permutations. For example, there are 60 permutations in the abbccc sequence,
including cabcbc and abcbcc. Spacing increased ratings on a final exam composed of
novel issues of the same kind in both types of research (Bower et al, 2015).
Result
The college students who learned the task within a single session got less score
than the students who learned their tasks in spaced sessions. Furthermore, their score
doubled in respect of the first type.
Experiment 2
It includes evaluating the acquisition of reading abilities by first graders. All
learners got 6 minutes of training per day for 2 weeks in their regular schools. One group
of learners obtained this instruction in a single6-minute session, while another group
received this instruction in three distinct 2-minute sessions at unspecified intervals
(Podrigalo et al., 2015).
Result
When the test results came to the group who had the learning in a 6-minute
session. Scored very fewer points than the other students.

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Discussion
The vast majority of studies on the spacing effect have been conducted in the
laboratory, and these studies typically require participants to learn relatively simple
types of verbal information such as word lists or trivia facts. Recently, however, new
findings have emerged showing that spacing can also improve the learning of
information that is conceptually more difficult. For example, it was found that longer
spacing gaps improved English-learning adults’ understanding of subtle grammatical
rules (Clark, Tanner-Smith & Killingsworth, 2016).
However, one finding appears to be credible. Any type of separation— whether fixed or
extended— appears to encourage learning. In research comparing either a fixed or
extended timetable to an amassed timetable in which three or more presentations of an
object happen back-to-back in instant succession, it has been constantly shown that
either sort of spacing schedule generates better learning than the other conjured up
process.
Recommendation
In the first place, teachers may include a short overview of ideas learned a few
weeks previously in each class.
Second, homework tasks could be used to re-expose learners to significant information
that they have earlier learned. This suggestion may be particularly helpful when class
time is restricted and it is hard for a review to fit into a lesson on any specified day.
For example, the instructor could intentionally include questions about the information
that was learned in class a few weeks earlier (Liu et al., 2016).

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Third, teachers could take tests and quizzes that are cumulative. In addition to re-
exposing learners to data they have earlier learned, cumulative tests and quizzes give
students a good reason to re-examine data on their own.
These three suggestions are not mutually exclusive and, like any instructions, are more
likely to generate beneficial teaching results when used in combination with one another
(more on pedagogical suggestions concerning spacing,
Conclusion
In this review, we highlighted some key findings on the types of enhancing the
benefits of learning from spacing, demonstrations of the effects of spacing in educational
settings, and explorations of the ideal spacing gap. We also tried to shed some light on
how the advantages of spaced exercise could be realized in everyday training. We hope
that this data will be of importance to learners.