Hello, hope you are doing well, and to people who have recently joined this list - a very warm welcome!
I was rather unexpectedly put in touch with an editor for The Conversation recently, and asked to write a piece on cramming for exams.
It’s a tricky issue to discuss – clearly, cramming is not a very good idea. One of the main reasons is that rapid forgetting occurs, which we can understand in terms of the forgetting curve. Building lasting learning takes time, spaced practice, and the application of other desirable difficulties that I have discussed on these updates previously, such as retrieval practice (see update #36).
It was certainly a little dispiriting in my years as a secondary teacher to hear students proudly stating how they had passed their summer exams and then forgotten everything! I know that there’s an element of peer approval involved in this, and flawed judgements, too (they probably hadn’t actually forgotten as much as they thought), but still… It appeared that cramming and then forgetting was seen by some as a bit of a win against the system!
Anway, I came up with the following piece. It focuses heavily on the spacing effect, and considers two main things:
that it would be better to space out practice over the school year, but not to delay so much that things are being forgotten by the time of revision/ exams,
even in the shorter timescale of revision, some spacing out can be helpful.
Here’s a link to the article below...please share if you found it interesting!
Cramming for an exam isn’t the best way to learn – but if you have to do it, here’s how
All the best for the coming week,
Jonathan
Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.