Will That Be on the Test?

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Toward the end of the 19th century, the German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus concocted an experiment that countless children have unwittingly replicated ever since, over a morning bowl of Alpha-Bits. Ebbinghaus took consonants from the alphabet, slapped a random vowel between them, and, voila! some 2,300 nonsense syllables were born. For years, Ebbinghaus practiced these syllables at random, learning and re-learning until he had mastered the material. In 1885, he recorded his observations in Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology — a seminal work that countless psychologists have wittingly read ever since, over morning bowls of cereal or otherwise.

Near the end of his monograph, Ebbinghaus mentioned a “noteworthy” detail from his learning trials. He found that a particular 12-syllable series could be conquered in two ways: by cramming 68 repetitions into a single day before testing, or by spacing 38 repetitions across several days. The difference, he wrote, was significant. “It makes the assumption probable that with any considerable number of repetitions a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than the massing of them at a single time.”¹

Ebbinghaus’s tests had a sample size of one: himself. But time and again, using far more rigorous empirical settings, psychologists confirmed the potency of this “spacing effect.” The method would seem to lend itself to immediate real-world application; what teacher or student would not want to enhance learning while limiting study-time?
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