Distributed Concept Reviews Improve Exam Performance

Abstract

Distributed practice is a learning strategy in which studying is distributed, or spaced, across multiple study sessions. Another learning technique, interleaved practice, mixes material from multiple lectures. I designed this study to test the effect of distributed concept reviews of interleaved material on exam scores in an introductory psychology course. Students who received the concept review outperformed students who did not receive the review—a result driven by exam questions related to concepts presented in the review itself. In fact, the number of times a concept was presented in the review was directly related to the likelihood of a correct response on the exam. These results indicate that distributed, interleaved concept reviews are an effective method of improving student learning in broad introductory courses.