Spaced Repetition
Reviewing material at increasing intervals rather than in one concentrated session. Spacing the same total study time improves long-term retention.
The spacing effect goes back to Hermann Ebbinghaus, whose 1885 experiments produced the forgetting curve and the observation that distributed practice beat massed practice for the same amount of work. Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer summarised the verbal-recall literature in Psychological Bulletin in 2006, finding a consistent advantage for spaced over massed study.
Spaced repetition is the applied version: a schedule that returns each item just as it starts to fade, the gap stretching after each successful recall. Its partner is retrieval practice, testing yourself from memory rather than rereading, which Roediger and Karpicke established as stronger than review.
Robert Bjork's desirable difficulties covers this: study that feels effortful and unproductive in the moment frequently produces durable learning, while the fluency of rereading is a poor guide to retention.
Spacing is a property of the schedule, not the channel, so its benefit does not depend on modality or preference.
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