A version of this post was originally published in Education Technology, on April 17, 2021.
Researchers and educators have always tried to optimize how we consume knowledge by looking at the realities of the learning brain. We now know that students learn better when learning is spread out over time. This is called the spacing effect, a term coined by the renowned memory scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus. If you give students a list of historical dates to memorize, they will retain it much better if they try to recall the dates in a few sessions rather than memorize them all at once.
Educators have put the spacing effect to good use through micro learning, which is the pedagogical practice of dividing learning into easily digestible nuggets of information. Contrary to popular belief, micro learning has been around for quite some time, and many teachers have been delivering lessons in a microformat without calling it so (using flashcards is an excellent example of micro learning).
Tags: Micro Learning • teachers