2024/10/02 by Ewan Murray, Silke Melanie Goebel, Aidan J. Horner · 1 voice
Mathematics · Social Sciences · #Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills #Mathematics Education and Teaching Techniques
paper · doi:10.31234/osf.io/hxc8e
Spacing, distributing practice over time rather than in a single session, often benefits long-term memory of simple material. However, it is less clear whether spacing is effective for more complex material. As more educators harness the spacing effect, it is important to know under what conditions it is most effective. We investigated the impact of procedural complexity on the efficacy of spacing, by varying the number of steps in arithmetic procedures. Participants were taught two procedures, either in a single session (massed) or over three sessions spanning three consecutive days (spaced). Experiment one compared learning a two-step with a three-step procedure. Spaced practice led to significantly higher performance, relative to massed practice, with no evidence for a difference in the spacing effect as a function of procedural complexity. However, there was also no evidence for a difference in performance between the two procedures, suggesting the three-step procedure was not sufficiently more complex than the two-step procedure. Experiment two compared learning a two-step with a five-step procedure. We again saw a significant spacing effect, as well a main effect of complexity, with performance in the five-step procedure being significantly lower than the two-step procedure. As in Experiment one, we found no evidence for an interaction between procedural complexity and the spacing effect. Our results show that spacing benefits the learning of arithmetic procedures. Critically, we also show that the spacing effect is not negatively impacted by the procedural complexity of the procedure learnt.