Spaced Learning: Why Repetition Increases Recall
By: Sara Angelilli, DNP, MS, RN, CNOR, NPD-BC
Published: 5/16/2025
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Did you ever attend a webinar and leave the session thinking about how amazing the new information was only to completely forget it three days later? The process of encoding information for long-term storage is a strategy that we can learn and apply to teaching methodologies to improve information recall and subsequently knowledge transfer for our learners.
Novice nurses in perioperative services have a steep learning curve during their first year of practice. AORN designed the evidence-based education course Periop 101 to support the transition to practice for novice perioperative nurses. Periop 101 course administrators can increase the success of knowledge retention for course participants by incorporating spaced learning in the course delivery. This article highlights the value of using repetition to increase knowledge recall during the Periop 101 course.
What is the Forgetting Curve?
The goal of education and training is to present information to a learner who transfers the knowledge and skills into practice. When we present new information to a learner, a series of events must take place for the information to make it into their long-term memory storage so they can recall it later. In information processing, learners use their attention to select the information that they want to process in their working memory to create an internal representation or meaning from the sensory input. If we don’t rehearse or encode the information within the first two days that we learn it, we will lose access to it by displacement with new information.
German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus created a visual representation of the way information retention fades over time from his research on memory. The learner’s information retention immediately starts to drop when the information is not reviewed or reinforced. The rate of memory loss is exponential, which is why the steepest drop in the knowledge retention curve happens in the first few days after learning new information.1
The Answer is Spaced Learning
Spaced learning is the periodic review of information soon after the information is presented. The ideal time to start spaced learning is one to two days after the information is presented.1 This ensures that recall hasn’t dropped so low that the learners have difficulty remembering the information. The periodic review decreases the rate of forgetting following each review session.1 As a result, you can increase the amount of time between future review sessions because learners will forget less information over time with repetition.
Tips to Implement Spaced Learning for Periop 101
- Start each class day by asking the learners to share how they have implemented one thing they have learned in practice since the last class.
- End each class with a one-minute writing activity by asking each student to write their clearest point and muddiest point from the lecture. Ask each student to share and have them give feedback to each other on the muddiest points to clarify information.
- E-mail a brief three- to five-question quiz one day after the content is presented.
- Ask the learners to share one thing that they remember about a given topic at the start of class three days after it was presented.
- Develop a weekly case study that applies the information learned in the previous week.
- Host a monthly review session using a kinesthetic game like the beachball policy review game or using a gamified quiz program like Mentimeter or Poll Everywhere.
- Host a final review for the Periop 101 exam using an escape room or Jeopardy!-style game.
Expert tip: Don’t feel like you need to implement every tip listed above. Experiment with the options and choose what works best for your teaching style, the learners’ needs, and the resources to which you have access.
Other Tips to Improve Recall
- Chunk information together by organizing it in a logical way.
- Use storytelling to help learners make meaning out of the information by explaining the rationale and context for knowledge application.
- Make a direct connection between the information and how the application of the information will help them deliver the best evidence-based nursing care.
- Integrate hands-on practice or interactive learning to help learners immediately apply the information.
- Integrate previous material into new material when appropriate.
- Integrate other principles of adult learning theory so the course material is highly engaging and meets the unique needs of course participants.
Reference
- Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve: why we keep forgetting and what we can do about it. MindTools. Accessed October 22, 2024. https://prime.mindtools.com/pages/article/forgetting-curve.htm
