A basic truth of expert exam performance is that, to do well, you have to know the subject matter, inside and out. Traditional studying methods don’t do help you to do that very well. One landmark study found that within 24 hours of memorizing new information, only about 34 percent of it is remembered. At a month, it’s down to 21 percent.
This is where a technique called spaced repetition comes in. By using spaced repetition, users will remember a projected 92% of what they study – and not just for a few days but for as long as they use it. And if that’s not enough, it ultimately takes far less time to study and learn using spaced repetition than other study methods.
If you’ve never heard of this technique, it’s because it’s never been applied to legal education before now. However, its use is widespread in other fields, most notably, medical education, and it’s been touted in places such as the New York Times and the Harvard Business Review, among others.
How does spaced repetition work? It begins by asking users to study an electronic version of the humble flashcard. But behind that electronic flashcard is an algorithm based on a century of research and reams of scientific data. The basic concept is that whenever any person learns new information, they immediately begin to forget it. The rate of forgetting varies from person to person, but predicting when a person will forget is easy to determine with the right information. Scientists call this phenomenon “the forgetting curve.”
For every flashcard users review, they are prompted to report how well they know the answer after reviewing it. If a user knows it well, he or she won’t see the card again for a longer time; if the user struggled to remember, he or she will be shown it again sooner. Based on each answers, the system customizes to a user’s personal forgetting curve and then analyzes that information to prompt studying at just the right time.
As users learn with spaced repetition, another well-studied scientific principle kicks in: the spacing effect. The spacing effect says that as long as people review information at the right time, they forget more slowly and need to remind themselves less often. That means that to memorize a new concept for the long term, one might have to review it after a day but then not again for 3 days and, after that, not for seven days and, after that, not for 30 days and, after that, not for 90 days, and so on.
For first-year law students studying for contracts or property, evidence or torts, using spaced repetition gives them an advantage not just on their course-specific exams but also years later when studying for the bar because the Multistate Bar Exam largely tests on topics covered in the first year. That means when others are re-learning first year content for the bar material, spaced repetition users will only need to do occasional reviews of concepts they’ve banked in memory for the long term.
This technology isn’t just for 1Ls or bar preppers: people at all stages of their legal education can benefit. Upper-level students can, of course, study for the bar, but they can also create and collaborate with classmates to make sets of cards for other courses that aren’t bar tested.
So, imagine it. Would you want to learn 3 or 4 times as much in a fraction of the time? Want to do it all from your iPhone? You can – with spaced repetition.
