Staggered lessons may boost recall
Staggered lessons may boost recall
Before you rush off to duplicate their experiment while studying Spanish, remember they were using sea snails! 
But seriously, neuroscientists have been making significant progress in understanding how memories are formed. And most of their research points to some form of spaced repetition as aiding memory formation.
The key seems to be:
"everyone requires different intervals."
Even a personally tailored program can sometimes benefit from modifying intervals.
I've found the Recall section of SpanishDict's flashcards works exceedingly well for me. Although the Recognize and Listen sections are helpful, I really cement the words in the Recall section.
Sometimes it is helpful to replay the flashcards from the beginning and listen to the words several times before redoing the Recall section.
Clicking on the sound icon 
will allow you to listen as often as you like
¡Buena suerte!
1 Answer
Hey Terri, thanks for the articles.
First, I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the study just because it used the lowly sea snail. The older I get the more in common I have with them, i.e., getting more slug-gish, requiring lots of repetition to learn anything, forgetting in five days (or less).....
Second, I think it's very mean and selfish of scientists to treat snails in this manner just for the sake of another obscure paper with a very limited scope. I hope it was worth it!
Seriously, studies like these say something for "haphazard learning," if you will, which is pretty much what daily life is all about. Little children learn in response to stimuli over which they have no control and which often occurs without any purposeful thought or interval on the part of their caregivers. Other, more purposeful, efforts include reading the same bedtime story over and over ad infinitum until the child has it completely memorized. Ditto with videos. Children seem to instinctively crave repetition to the extreme (as anyone knows who has had to listen to Barney the Dinosaur sing his stupid song for the bazillionth time)! There is a clue to learning there that we adults should heed. Like going back over the Recall section after some interval of time of forgetfulness -- it's simple, it's mundane, it's not as sexy as the Word of the Day, it's sometimes tedious, but it works.
When it comes to language, I'll bet that the proper interval is tied to forgetting, not remembering. It does no good to go over words that you do remember - that's just boring and doesn't reinforce anything except for a distaste for that particular task. It just leads to fatigue. The reward comes from doing a list or video that you recognize but don't remember all that well. This becomes a challenge - an exercise to see how much we do remember and how quickly we can relearn what we have forgotten. I've heard that ratio called "the savings score" which represents how much we can recall/relearn correctly in what percentage of time compared to the original learning task. It's also been called "relearning" and it is the only consolation for an aging brain. Yeah, I forgot, but so what!.... look how much quicker I learned it the second (or fifth, or sixth) time around! 
