Space Out!

After looking at Blocked Practice last week and reviewing its limited effectiveness, we now turn our attention to other methods that can provide us with better learning outcomes. You may recall from last week’s blog that the most effective learning techniques are designed to RETAIN the most information after each practice session. So today we’ll look into another commonly used strategy that provides significantly better results than the traditional blocked approach.

Have you ever tried to cram for a test, exam, or learn a piece overnight for your lesson in the morning? I think we’ve all done it at some point, and are probably aware that it doesn’t really work that well, despite our best last-minute efforts!

Rather than pulling an all-nighter, or feverishly trying to learn a million notes a minute, we need to spread out our practice sessions more strategically in order to soak up a lot more information.

This is where Spaced Practice (also known as Distributed Practice) comes into play. Spaced Practice is a strategy where repetition is distributed over time, by gradually chipping away at the material that you wish to learn, rather than covering it all in one go (Blocked). You might work on a specific section of a piece in the morning, then again at night. Or practise it on Monday, then Wednesday, then again on Friday or Saturday.

Think of Blocked Practice as a sprint, and Spaced Practice as a marathon – or compare it to the story of the hare and the tortoise (slow and steady wins the race!)🐇🐢🏆

While it might feel like you are not making as much progress compared to Blocked Practice, Spaced Practice effectively improves retention rates by providing you with more time between sessions. This means that your memory will be a bit hazy when you return to the same section again, therefore requiring more effortful memory retrieval. This might seem counterintuitive, but as I mentioned last week, forgetting is an essential ingredient for greater learning to occur!

So how come Spaced Learning is more effective than doing it all in one block?

Blocked Practice is useful when first learning a skill, but research has shown that Spaced Repetition is far more effective in converting new learning into long-term memory. When learning new information your brain needs time to reorganise and stabilise these memories for long-term storage. This is a process called consolidation, and can take hours, and up to several days to fully run its course. Through this stage your brain goes over the newly learned material and connects it with past experiences. It is this connection with prior knowledge that is essential in accurately understanding new information.

As Blocked Practice relies heavily on short-term memory and allows far less time for consolidation, it makes learning possibilities quite limited. Spaced Practice, however, gives us time to mentally sort through new information, which creates a clearer understanding of how everything fits together. The additional time available for consolidation leads to greater understanding and retention of new information.

The process of forgetting and recalling information for learning was first discovered by German psychologist and memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. Ebbinghaus found that the greatest amount of forgetting happened within the first hour after initial learning had occurred. On average, a person will forget more than half of new information presented after an hour, and approximately 70% forgotten after 24 hours. That’s A LOT of forgetting! 😳

To slow down the rate of forgetting, he found that going over the same information at specific intervals helped to significantly increase the amount of information retained. This phenomenon was soon labelled “the Spacing Effect”, and Spaced Repetition was born!

So what does Spaced Practice look like for musicians?

A good weekly guide is to practice at regular, shorter intervals over the whole week, rather than longer, more infrequent sessions over only a few days. It is better to practise for 30 minutes every day, than try to cram 3.5 hours in just 1 or 2 days. This way you can cover specific skills or pieces more than once throughout the week, yet leave considerable time (a few hours to a couple of days) between covering the same material again.

Within a week’s practice, a good strategy is to gradually increase the amount of time between sessions on a particular technique or section of a piece. Start by spacing particular sections a few minutes apart, with just enough time for a little bit of forgetting to occur. Then once your memory starts to become stronger, increase the amount of time between repetitions so that more forgetting can take place. When you are feeling really certain, leave the section for a day or two. Gradually strengthen your skills not by covering absolutely everything every day, but by spacing your learning over longer and longer periods of time. This will help build your skills and retain as much information as possible.

Next week we’ll turbo-charge this idea even more, with my favourite daily practice strategy! 👍

Spaced Practice Takeaways

• Forgetting is an essential ingredient for greater learning.

• You forget the most amount of information within the first hour of learning (more than half).

• Time between repeating material is needed for better memory consolidation.

• Whilst blocked repetition might SOUND and FEEL better in the practice room, spaced repetition leads to far greater RETENTION, even though it might feel more difficult and not sound quite so good.