When to Study With “Locked Practice” (and When Not To)
When you’re preparing for a lesson, you need to develop a strategy to determine how much you study, how quickly you do it, and how well you retain information, not to mention how long you retain it. I generally recommend distributed practice for maximum retention, but there are times when “blocked practice,” its opposite, can be beneficial.
What is distributed and locked practice?
Distributed practice, also known as spaced repetition, encourages you to study and review the same topic over and over again at different times. By spreading out your study sessions, you embed the information deeper into your memory, making it easier to retrieve when you need it. This requires you to look ahead a little: according to one study , the best option for maximizing retention is to study the same topic every 10-30% of the time it takes you to retain it; so if you have a test in 10 days, you will study every one to three days from now until then. Typically, you also combine this with interleaving , or the process of mixing different topics in study sessions, which helps you categorize information and work on problem solving. Through a combination of distributed practice and rotation, you’ll learn in small chunks each day, but those chunks will be separated by subject or idea so you’re fully engaging your brain.
Blocked (or massed) practice is the opposite of this: it involves studying one topic once over an extended period. It’s basically a fancy way of saying “cramming.” There are very few opportunities to rotate, and you usually do it when you’re slightly stressed, in the lead-up to a test or other important event. In fact, researchers have found that the best definition of blocked practice is that you imagine the same information over and over again without switching to anything else.
When to Use Distributed or Blocked Practice for Learning
Although spaced repetition is generally praised for its ability to help you remember information, using blocked practice in certain situations does have some benefits. For example, it results in faster skill acquisition, which is counterbalanced by the limitations it places on your ability to retain information long term or generalize it to new situations a few days after studying. Essentially, if you choose blocked practice, you’ll learn the material quickly, but you won’t retain it as long and won’t be able to apply what you’ve learned to anything other than the very specific things you need. studied.
In this case, blocked practice works well if you only want to get an A on the test and/or the test is coming up quickly. If you have a question to ask about something specific and you won’t have a chance to apply the knowledge more broadly, blocked practice is fine. To get the most out of it, try using the Pomodoro method to at least break up your cramming into more manageable chunks by studying for 25 minutes and taking five-minute breaks. Grab a Pomodoro timer to help you stay on track and stop looking at your phone to check the time. If you’re going to cram, you need to focus and stick with it, even if it’s really last minute or you just want to master the knowledge long enough to pass the test.
If the content will be repeated throughout the lesson or learning in the longer term, or if you are asked to think abstractly and apply knowledge beyond the situations you are covering, choose distributed practice. when will you be able to. Use a study planner to help you determine which days you should study based on test times, and also get some flashcards so you can use the Leitner system , which is a flashcard method based on spaced repetition. to help you retain materials in long-term memory. Using a planner and flashcards may seem a little outdated, but writing things down instead of typing them out also helps your memory , and since you’re using spaced repetition, you have time.