Distributed Practice Vs Massed Practice Essay

Distributed vs. Massed Practice: Which Produces Better Learning? That is the question. Teaching has, and always will require some kind of exercise & application process in order for the student to grasp the material at hand. From the moment Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, discovered massed and distributed practice in the 19th century, there have been numerous arguments about which of the two methods provided the best results. Although there have been studies done to back massed practice for short term retention, actual learning is produced by distributed practice, which provides the individual with the ability to store the information into long term memory making it available for retrieval at a later time. Massed Practice can be described as a learning technique where the material at hand is shown or displayed recurrently over a …show more content…
The study involved two teachers, each with their own group of students. One teacher used the distributed method, practicing literacy and phonics for 2-minute sessions 3 times a day, and the teacher using the massed method of teaching did the exact same thing but rather for 6 consecutive minutes a day. After testing each individual student from both groups, the results for the most advancement in literacy, phonics, and letter combinations were in favor of the students using distributed practice. Not only was their improvement from the students, but the amount of improvement was significant, with students scoring a high 8.3 points of improvement as opposed to the students under massed practice conditions who only scored a mere 1.3 points. That’s almost 7 times the improvement of the students who were taught using massed