Why doesn't academia incorporate spaced repetition in higher education?

Question

There are many publications explaining advantages of spaced repetition. I found a summary of some of them here.

While a lot of studies show many advantages of spaced repetition, it is not formally applied to higher education. Why is that?

UPDATE 1: In order to clarify my question, I added a quote form this publication:

Furthermore, even after acknowledging the benefits of spacing, changing teaching practices proved to be enormously difficult. Delaney et al (2010) wrote: “Anecdotally, high school teachers and college professors seem to teach in a linear fashion without repetition and give three or four noncumulative exams.” (p. 130). Focusing on the math domain, where one might expect a very easy-to-review-and-to-space strategy, Rohrer (2009) points out that mathematics textbooks usually present topics in a non-spaced, non-mixed fashion. Even much earlier, Vash (1989) had written: “Education policy setters know perfectly well that [spaced practice] works better [than massed practice]. They don’t care. It isn’t tidy. It doesn’t let teachers teach a unit and dust off their hands quickly with a nice sense of ‘Well, that’s done.’” (p. 1547).

Rohrer, D. (2009). The effects of spacing and mixing practice problems. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 40, 4-17

Vash, C. L. (1989). “The spacing effect: A case study in the failure to apply the results of psychological research”. American Psychologist, 44, 1547 (a comment on Dempster’s article?)

By the way, I am not trying to defend this publication or the quote. I just want to figure out if people believe this is true. If yes, why policy makers do not formally incorporate spaced repetition in education systems.

UPDATE 2: I really appreciate your interest in answering my question. I think there are still some unclear points that I want to mention here:

Please read the article in my question. Then you'll see the difference between "active recall" in spaced repetition and being exposed to concepts by reading books or attending lectures in our education system. Here are a couple of quotes:

active recall is a far superior method of learning than simply passively being exposed to information. ... There are many studies to the effect that active recall is best. Here’s one recent study, “Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping”, Karpicke 2011 (covered in Science Daily and the NYT) ... “Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits”. New York Times.

While "spiral learning" is basically the foundation of spacing, in addition spacing heavily relies on active recall. Furthermore, spacing takes advantage of chunking in designing flash cards.

Moreover, there are well-defined spacing algorithms, designed by famous psychologists like Dr. Leitner, that significantly improve the efficiency of learning. Please look at studies by Professor David Shanks and Dr. Rosalind Potts.

Finally, in response to those who think spacing only improves memorizing, please read about the results of Professor Bjork's many years of experiments, specifically "Kornell, N., Castel, A. D., Eich, T. S., & Bjork, R. A. (2010). “Spacing as the friend of both memory and induction in younger and older adults”. Psychology and Aging, 25, 498-503."

Now, do you believe schools should leave students on their own to discover efficient ways of learning, or do you believe it's better to incorporate these well-studied methodologies into the education system? As a student, I pay my school to provide me with motivation, pathways, and efficient ways of learning, rather than merely providing me with a competitive environment to prove myself for a better job in the future.

Let me clarify this: I love education, research, and even just being at school. However, I believe in considering all improvements that technology has provided for us in different aspects of our lives, and I believe our education system is too old. I believe we can apply well-studied theories of learning, knowledge, neuroscience, and psychology to our education system, through the use of technology, and really improve our education system. I am trying my best to play my small role in this regard. My main purpose of asking this question in this forum is to brainstorm with you to collaboratively and learn how to improve our education system.

Answer 1

In tertiary education, it is the responsibility of the students to pick appropriate learning methods. It is simply not the task of a university to incorporate spaced repetition or any other learning technique, because revising and repetition is something that students have to do on their own. Bluntly put, if students "exhibit [an] illusion", that's something students must fix, not the university.

What could be done at universities is inform students about techniques such as spaced repetition (and I am not convinced this isn't already happening one way or another).

As you say, some universities pay attention to assessments of education quality. Certainly, such assessments are not looked at for their own good, but because some other decisions are based upon them. For instance, funding for a university might be influenced by results from an assessment, but if the respective funder does not take into account retention of learning, there is no motivation to try and influence this aspect. Likewise, some kinds of assessments may be paid attention to by marketing and PR departments of a university, while they are of little to no interest to the actual teaching staff.

Then, if an aspect is not covered by any assessment the institution considers relevant, the decision will be made based upon what the teaching staff considers most beneficial (usually in an uncontrolled process, by each teaching staff member individually). And this can well mean to give students some more responsibility in order to help them evolve into autonomous professionals.

Now, if you ask why external assessments do not take into account retention a lot, that is quite a different question, and its answer has to do with a mixture of ignorance and convenience:

• Ignorance because the people who set goals for such assessments know little about the individual subject areas, and also design the assessments in a subject-agnostic way, as the (possibly unrealistic?) expectation is to also make very different subjects comparable. Depending on the assessment, it may also be a design goal to make the assessment results comprehensible without knowing anything about the subject.
• Convenience because "We do not know." or "We will see in X years." are too impractical answers, even though they might be accurate. The assessments are probably designed with the idea that once the assessment is over, there is a final and definitive result about the current state/quality of the university. This in turn favours a disregard of aspects that need to be measured over prolonged periods of time, such as retention long after an exam.

Answer 2

In higher education, if there is information to be memorized, students are generally expected to do that themselves, in their own time and their own way. This is unlike primary education, for example, where teachers may use class time to help students memorize things.

So spaced repetition "is not formally applied to higher education" because generally, in higher education students are responsible for learning the concepts presented in class on their own, outside of class. I'm not aware of any technique for memorization that is "formally applied to higher education."

Most universities do offer students some advice on how to study more effectively, and this advice often includes information on spaced repetition (though it may not use that exact terminology.) See e.g. this UW page or this NYU page.

Answer 3

Spaced repetition is indirectly present in higher ed. We have all heard the humorous phrase that an ms is "more of the same" and a PhD is "pile higher and deeper". This implies that there is indeed some repetition from undergrad to grad school.

However, it's not enough to just memorize the content. Students are expected to go "deeper" in their expertise and to critically apply this knowledge through extending through conducting research.

At each level of education familiar themes are explored again at a more sophisticated level. By default old simpler concepts are reviewed before adding the next layer of knowledge. This reviewing of familiar material is an opportunity for spaced repetition and perhaps an example of constructivism

Answer 4

Why doesn't academia incorporate spaced repetition in higher education?

Because

1. the majority of educators have not given much thought to how the brain works in learning, or about best practices in teaching;

2. few educational institutions have much in the way of quality control or improvement mechanisms in place; and

3. few educators take the initiative on their own to observe each other's classes or discuss teaching practices with colleagues.

I once worked in a small, private-pay school in Latin America that taught English as a second language, in one-hour long classes, of 3 to 12 students per class. The school was part of a franchise. The director and the teachers were highly motivated to use teaching methods that work, because the school's continued existence, and thus the teachers' continued employment, were on the line. We were given articles about best practices in language teaching, and encouraged to read and discuss them; and observation of each other's classes, and feedback from colleagues, were built into the job.

These pedagogical improvement practices were effective, on a short time scale. I have not seen them in use in any other educational institutions I, or members of my family, have been involved in. What I've seen, for the most part, is a lot of hamsters happily spinning on their own exercise wheels.

Answer 5

Whether students in tertiary education continue in academia or move out of it, if they want a successful career then (self)-education will continue for the rest of their working lives.

Working in the engineering industry, I am now using theoretical concepts on a daily basis that were too "recent and cutting-edge" to even be formally taught at university level when I graduated - indeed, some of them had not even been discovered.

Since educational theorists seem to invent a revolutionary new version of "educational best practice" every few years, it seems to me that the best chance for life-long students is to figure out something that works for them personally, rather than blindly following the path of the latest pedagogical fashion. After all, the most basic "learning experience" is discovering how to think for yourself.

Outside of the classroom there is usually no time for ideas like "spaced repetition". Either you get your head around new information faster than your competitors (whether they are inside and outside of your own workplace), or you watch their career progress overtake your own.

Answer 6

There's a guy named btilly (https://stackoverflow.com/users/585411/btilly) who used SR to teach linear algebra and it went very well.

He wrote a short post about it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818367) and a longer one too (http://bentilly.blogspot.co.il/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra.html).

A guy named wsprague wrote this in reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=819181):

The question of why is there so much crappy education is interesting. I think part of the answer is that society is well-served by the failings of the educational system in that widespread educational crappiness helps support the class system. I think it would be fairly straightforward to turn 90% of the population into well educated upper middle class types, using techniques like btilly describes...

... But if we did that, who would drink Coors and drive forklift for Walmart and not complain about it?

So I think that a huge function of the educational system is to educate a large part of the population badly. I think that the teacher training system serves this is as well, by selecting for mediocre teachers and then making them more mediocre via training. Additionally, in the schools themselves a lot of effort is made to classify young people into dumb and smart categories, usually unfairly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect), and this classification stamps them for the rest of their lives and creates a population of hopeless lower class workers.

If there are SOME good teachers in the system like btilly, then SOME kids go on to get out of their class, which is perfect in that (1) we need to claim that it is possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and (2) we need to recruit SOME kids to grow up to fill management positions, but not too many that they all can't find careers. Historically, underemployed educated people are the people who become union leaders.

The beauty of it is that the people who fail think it is their fault!

(Sorry to rant about the educational / class system in general, rather than the topic of how to teach advanced math, but I couldn't stop myself.)

Call me paranoid, but there you go.

Answer 7

In support of other answers (and a comment above by bmargulies): One argument is that using class time for repetition takes away time from thinking about new, and likely harder, skills. Apparently it's common for "spiral" approaches like this to generate resistance from parents. For example:

Some parents, like Ms. Demond, questioned the efficacy of the spiral structure and sequence of the Everyday Math curriculum:

"But I know, in her grades, we did have, like, more time, for everything, as far as addition, subtraction. We might have two weeks, or... I just know we spent more time than a week... Then they cram different things each day. Because each different day they might come home with something different. We had a set time to learn how to tell time, and… what’s the other stuff? ... We might have spent two weeks on that. Two weeks spending on something, that’s different. Other than just a week. Because, you’re not gonna learn how to do the rows and maybe money, in just a week, and then move on down to something else. They’re not gonna learn it. Can’t learn like that." (SCS, 2nd grade)

Schnee, Emily, and Enakshi Bose. "Parents Don't Do Nothing: Reconceptualizing Parental Null Actions as Agency." School Community Journal 20.2 (2010): 91. (Link)