Learn at night and relearn in the morning

Friday, October 12th, 2018

We already know that (1) spacing practice out results in better learning and long-term retention than cramming it all together, and (2) sleep enhances learning and long-term retention.

A team of French researchers combined these two effects into a simple practice scheduling hack:

Two groups of 20 participants were tasked with learning the French translations of 16 Swahili words. All 40 participants went through the same exact training, but there was one teensy difference.

One group (“wake” group) had their first study session at 9am, and their relearning session at 9pm on the same day. The other group (“sleep” group) had their first study session at 9pm, and their relearning session at 9am the following morning.

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The researchers kept track of how much practice the participants needed to get all 16 translations correct. The sleep group got to perfect recall in about half the time that it took the wake group (3.05 cycles through the list vs. 5.80 cycles). Plus, every single participant in the sleep group got a perfect score within 5 attempts, whereas 75% of the wake group needed more practice.

[...]

A full half a year later, the sleep group continued to out-remember the wake group (8.67 correct vs. 3.35).

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