Distributed learning is defined as opposed to massed learning. Reviews of material separated by a long period of time ("spaced") yield more learning

Learning

Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...

 than reviews separated by a shorter period of time ("massed"); this is called the spacing effect

Spacing effect

In psychology, the spacing effect refers to the fact that humans and animals more easily remember or learn items in a list when they are studied a few times over a long period of time , rather than studied repeatedly in a short period time .The phenomenon was first identified by Hermann Ebbinghaus;...

. Review of material increases long-term memory

Long-term memory

Long-term memory is memory in which associations among items are stored, as part of the theory of a dual-store memory model. According to the theory, long term memory differs structurally and functionally from working memory or short-term memory, which ostensibly stores items for only around 20–30...

 best when there is more time between introduction and review of material. It has been suggested that it would be better for exams to be taken after a break than before, assuming there was a review before the exams, because of the spacing effect.

According to a behavioral study, distributed learning across a 24 hour interval does not enhance immediate memory performance but instead slows the rate of forgetting

Forgetting

Forgetting refers to apparent loss of information already encoded and stored in an individual's long term memory. It is a spontaneous or gradual process in which old memories are unable to be recalled from memory storage. It is subject to delicately balanced optimization that ensures that...

 relative to massed learning. The savings in forgetting were specific to relational memory, but not item memory.

See also

• Episodic memory
  Episodic memory
  Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events that can be explicitly stated. Semantic and episodic memory together make up the category of declarative memory, which is one of the two major divisions in memory...
  
  
• Learning theories
• Memory consolidation
  Memory consolidation
  Memory consolidation is a category of processes that stabilize a memory trace after the initial acquisition. Consolidation is distinguished into two specific processes, synaptic consolidation, which occurs within the first few hours after learning, and system consolidation, where...
  
  
• Spaced learning
  Spaced learning
  Spaced learning is a teaching method in which the educational content is repeated three times, with two 10-minute breaks during which physical activity is performed by the students. It is based on the mechanism for creating long term memories reported by R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American...