Whence comes the advantage of recitation? It has a twofold advantage: it is more stimulating, and it is more satisfying. When you know you are going to attempt recitation at once, you are stimulated to observe positions, peculiarities, relationships, and meanings, and thus your study [{341}] goes on at a higher level than when the test of your knowledge is still far away, with many readings still to come. You are also stimulated to manipulate the material, by way of grouping and rhythm.
On the side of satisfaction, recitation shows you what parts of the lesson you have mastered and gives you the glow of increasing success. It shows you exactly where you are failing and so stimulates to extra attention to those parts of the lesson. It taps the instincts of exploration, manipulation, and mastery much more effectively than continued re-reading of the same lesson can do. The latter becomes very uninteresting, monotonous and fatiguing.
Perhaps, after all, the greatest advantage of reciting is that it makes you do, in learning, the very act that you have later to perform in the test; for what you have finally to do is to recite the lesson without the book. When reading, you are doing something different; and if it were altogether different, it probably would not help you at all towards success in the test. But since intelligent reading consists partly in anticipating and outlining as you go, it is a sort of half recitation, it is halfway doing what you are trying to learn to do. Memorizing consists in performing an act, now, with assistance, that you later wish to perform without assistance; and recitation first stimulates you to fashion the act conformably to the object in view, and then exercises you in performing that act.
Spaced and unspaced repetition.
Another question on the economical management of memorizing: Is it better to keep steadily going through the lesson till you have it, or to go through it at intervals? If you were allowed a certain time, and no more, in which to prepare for examination on a certain memory lesson, how could the study time be best distributed? This question also has received a very definite answer.
Spaced repetitions are more effective than unspaced. In an experiment of Piéron, a practised subject went through a list of twenty numbers with an interval of only thirty seconds between readings, and needed eleven readings to master the list. But a similar list, with five-minute intervals, was mastered in six readings; and the number of readings went down to five with an interval of ten minutes, and remained the same for longer intervals up to two days. With this particular sort of lesson, then, ten minutes was a long enough interval, and two days not too long, to give the greatest economy of time spent in actual study.
In a somewhat different experiment in another laboratory, lists of nonsense syllables were studied either two, four, or eight times in immediate succession, and this was repeated each day till a total of twenty-four readings had been given to each list; then, one day after the last reading of each list, the subjects were tested as to their memory of it. The result appears in the adjoining table.
EFFECT OF SPACED STUDY ON ECONOMY OF MEMORIZING (From Jost)
Distribution of
the 24 readings Total score Total score
of Mr. B. of Mr. M.
8 readings a day for 3 days 18 7
6 readings a day for 4 days 39 31
2 readings a day for 12 days 58 55
The widest distribution gave the best score. Undoubtedly, then, if you had to memorize a poem or speech, you would get better value for time spent if you read it once or twice at a time, with intervals of perhaps a day, than if you attempted to learn it at one continuous sitting. What exact spacing would give the very greatest economy would depend on the length and character of the lesson.