Summary

• Improve decision making (Helsdingen, van Gog, & van Merriënboer, 2011) • Support organization of content (Arnold & McDermott, 2013) • Increase metacognition (Brown et al., 2014) • Boost student confidence (Agarwal, D’Antonio, Roediger, McDermott, & McDaniel, 2014) • Raise students’ grades (Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015) • Enhance student engagement (Agarwal et al., 2014) • Build inductive reasoning skills (Kang & Pashler, 2012) • Lower anxiety (Agarwal et al., 2014; Szpunar, Khan, & Schacter, 2013) • Help students identify similarities and differences (Rohrer, 2012) • Improve students’ ability to decide what knowledge to use (Bjork, 2016) • Boost focus and reduce distraction (Metcalfe & Xu, 2016)

The wealth of benefits students and teachers receive from using spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval makes them ideal techniques for use in the classroom. In the context of a quickly evolving educational profession that exerts many demands on teachers’ time and rigorous expectations for student achievement, these are powerful and timely tools.

Summary

It’s time for teachers to take advantage of the brain-based learning techniques that studies have been endorsing for decades. Now that you know how the brain’s memory system works, you understand why spaced repetition, interleaving, and retrieval are effective and efficient. In addition, you know what benefits teachers and students can expect as they implement the techniques. So, what’s next? The following chapter offers you a deeper look at spaced repetition and teaches you how to implement it in your classroom.