Published
June 18, 2019
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Spaced repetition is essential to consolidate new knowledge developed by learners. Spaced repetition for training staff is your secret weapon to company success.
The way it works is by strengthening the mental pattern of retained information in our brains. Sounds pretty simple right? But this means material must be reviewed in snippets each day after initial absorption with increasingly large gaps between the review of knowledge.
Spaced repetition avoids cognitive overload, which results in fragmented and detached pieces of information, inhibiting information in long-term storage.
We have gathered the most important steps when implementing spaced repetition for staff training. Seatbelts on.
Forget rote memorisation (well it’s not hard to anyway) and welcome microlearning into your learning strategy. Microlearning speeds up the learning process through feeding information to learners in digestible, bite-sized chunks. This means new knowledge is processed and retained quicker, in other words, a solution to our atrocious attention spans. Our short-term memory can only hold up to five pieces of new information at any given time, which is where the principles of microlearning come in to save the day.
Think of spaced repetition as a weight and your brain as a bicep. If we’ve lost you, we mean that learning builds like that of an exercised muscle. The more you repeatedly feed your brain with specific information, the greater the chance it will store the information in long-term memory, which is what you want. Spaced repetition is one step ahead, using a core algorithm which expects a certain amount of knowledge loss in between periods spent away from information.
What’s a synonym for ‘a dream’? Yep, you got it, ‘efficient learning’. Spaced repetition is responsible for increasing the efficiency of learning through continual learning in intervals. What we mean is that you are able to spend less time learning, whilst retaining the same amount of new knowledge. Now is a good time to think about selling your desk, definitely your pens and most textbooks… Maybe not, but you know where we are going with this.
If you’d like to know more about SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s implementation of spaced repetition – which is based upon the SM-2 algorithm – and how it enhances institutional through the use of space repetition for staff learning, get in touch at enquiries@edapp.com. You can also try SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Mobile LMS for free by signing up here.
Source
https://examinedexistence.com/why-spaced-repetition-is-important-to-learning-and-how-to-do-it/
Author
Daniel Brown is a senior technical editor and writer that has worked in the education and technology sectors for two decades. Their background experience includes curriculum development and course book creation.