Effects of spacing repetitions on children's memory

Abstract

Two experiments examined the effect of spacing repetitions within a word list on the free recall performance of elementary school children. In the first experiment, spacing repetitions facilitated recall, and the function relating recall of repeated items to the spacing between repetitions was the same throughout the age range investigated (first, third, and sixth graders). But, the function for these elementary school children reached asymptote at a much shorter spacing than the function typically reported for adults. The second experiment was designed to test an encoding variability explanation of spaced-repetition effects in elementary school children. Results for both third- and sixth-grade children were consistent with the hypothesis that differential encoding of repetitions facilitates performance and that spaced repetitions are remembered better because they are more likely to be differentially encoded. A theoretical framework was discussed that may be able to encompass both these results and another finding in the literature which indicates that differential encoding can sometimes impair rather than facilitate children's memory performance.