Distributed Practice
What is Distributed Practice?
Distributed practice is a learning strategy that involves spacing study or training sessions across multiple time points. Rather than concentrating learning into one period, this approach draws on the principle that memory improves when we revisit information after a delay, rather than repeat it immediately.
The Basic Idea
It’s the night before a major exam, and the plan is ambitious: get through the contents of the entire semester in one sitting. There’s a stack of notes, a half-full coffee mug, and the vague hope that repetition of the learning material will lead to sufficient memory retention. It feels productive, at least at first. But somewhere between chapter seven and a caffeine crash, clarity starts to slip. Concepts blur. Time drags. By midnight, you’re exhausted, your notes are a blur, and the only thing you truly remember is that the textbook font is awful. Sound familiar?
In contrast, distributed practice takes a slower, more structured approach. Study sessions are spread out, not packed into a single stretch. Between those sessions, the brain does something counterintuitive—it forgets. But forgetting, in this case, isn’t a glitch in the system. It’s part of what makes the system work.1 When material is revisited after a pause, the mind has to reconstruct it from scratch. That process of retrieval, which is slightly effortful and occasionally frustrating, helps make the memory more stable.
This pattern is known in cognitive science as the spacing effect, and it’s the principle that underlies distributed practice.1 When learning is distributed across intervals, the effort required to retrieve it increases slightly, but so does the chance that it sticks. The brief lapse or forgetting introduces a desirable challenge: your brain has to work to reconstruct the information, drawing on cues, context, and prior knowledge. That extra mental work may be what strengthens long-term retention.
To be clear, distributed practice doesn’t require more time. The total minutes spent reviewing may stay the same. What shifts is the structure of delivery. Revisiting material right as it begins to fade can feel harder in the moment, but that struggle signals deeper encoding..2 Like a path that gets clearer each time we walk it, the mental route becomes easier to follow with every return. The knowledge doesn’t stay just because it was repeated endlessly. It stays because it was retrieved at the moment it nearly slipped away.
“Forgetting is essential to learning, just as exhaling is essential to breathing.”
— Pierce Brown, American best-selling novelist and author of the Red Rising series3
About the Author
Maryam Sorkhou
Maryam holds an Honours BSc in Psychology from the University of Toronto and is currently completing her PhD in Medical Science at the same institution. She studies how sex and gender interact with mental health and substance use, using neurobiological and behavioural approaches. Passionate about blending neuroscience, psychology, and public health, she works toward solutions that center marginalized populations and elevate voices that are often left out of mainstream science.
