Spaced! The Final Frontier

I wrote a while ago about memory - you may remember - and the problems of helping students to commit a mountain of information to memory.

In that light, we’re really excited to have started a new trial into ‘spaced learning’.

A glimpse at Google reveals that this term is open to some misinterpretation so, just to be clear, we’re using the methodology trialled at Monkseaton High School, inspired by the work of R Douglas Fields and developed by Paul Kelley.

When their work was first reported in the UK it was typically misunderstood by the British press who latched onto the idea that you could teach a whole science syllabus in 8 minutes.

It doesn’t do that.

It isn’t magic; we’re not going to be teaching people to remember eight packs of cards in order (there’s a bloke down the road who can do that for us).

It is, though, based on robust neuroscience. MIT’s 2016 report into online education is very clear about the potential that will be unleashed if the separate worlds of education and neuroscience can be made to overlap. They are surely right - in that as in so much else.

The technique is useful for transmitting a large amount of information which you want pupils to commit to long-term memory - so, basically, your course content.

It’s incredibly time-efficient - it’s possible to teach a whole topic, for example, in an hour and to do it in a way that will help the pupils to commit it to long-term memory very effectively.

And, in fact, it turns out that the bits when you’re not teaching are at least as important as the bits when you are!

Like the way a cinema screen has to be blank for half the time in order for us to be able to see the movement being depicted. When, as a cocky student, I discovered that fact, I remember asking for half my money back; the response from the manager of the Leamington Spa Regal was not particularly witty, but it was impressively clear.

Fields’ research looked at the neurological process of creating a memory and focused on how cells were ‘switched on’ and linked together during this process.

His team discovered that the cells were, surprisingly, not switched on by constant stimulation. The stimulation had to be separated by gaps when the cell was not being stimulated - and crucially, they discovered that the important factor was time - and the length of the gaps proved to be much more important than the length of the stimulation - though there are other good reasons for limiting that.

A word about what it’s not good for. It’s not good for developing deep understanding, the kind of understanding that means pupils can apply their knowledge in different contexts. We need to do different things to develop that. Things that are more enquiry-based, perhaps. More focused on problem-solving.

But it is an incredibly good way of transmitting information effectively.

One of the concerns about enquiry-based approaches is that pupils don’t have enough information to get started. Or, that there will be huge gaps in the information they ‘discover’, gaps which will be revealed in the final exam.

Spaced learning promises to be a way of addressing that concern.

Of course, that’s only half the story.

If we can make it work in an ‘in-person’ context, we then want to find out if we can translate it into an online context and leverage the known benefits of that approach.