We have just produced a resource to help people take up spaced learning: go to http://www.spacedlearning.org.uk/dvd/

The key to memory and Spaced Learning

 Creating long term memories is at the core of education.  Yet it wasn’t until 2005 the key discovery was made that explained exactly how long term memories are formed in the brain.  For the past three years we have been working on translating this discovery into real experiences for children, creating a solution called ‘spaced learning’.  Spaced learning is a method specifically aimed at creating long term memories rapidly.  Although it works, it doesn’t necessarily make teaching suddenly easy. 

 The scientific analysis of learning has very recently begun to answer some of the fundamental questions of learning.  This, in turn, will lead to shaping teaching and learning, not by tradition, but by science.  Professor Usha Goswami at Cambridge University is one of the leading neuroscientists, and she is clear about the impact of neuroscience on education because ‘instead of debating how learning is occurring, we will actually know how’. 

 Yet knowing how learning is occurring still leaves teachers with the problems of taking such knowledge into classrooms.  Scientific discoveries – no matter how significant- are only part of the answer. Teachers, with all their experience and understanding of young people, have to be partners with neruoscientists in applying science to improve education.  At the same time, there are still huge pressures on teachers to help students to achieve good exam results, and too little time to create new approaches for learning. 

 The key to memory

 The key discovery about memory revealed exactly how memories are formed, and, more significantly for teachers, how they can be created.  Douglas Fields of the National Institute for Child Health and Development in the US led the team investigating the science behind how the brain actually creates a memory.  The biological basis of a memory is a pathway of cells linked together within the brain.  His team looked experimentally at how these pathways were formed.  They focused on how each cell was ‘switched on’ and became linked to other cells. In other words, they were searching for how to form memories- what we, as teachers, tend to call learning. 

 Fields’ experiments proved that it was the way in which the brain’s cells are stimulated which causes them to ‘switch on’ and link together.  Surprisingly, constant stimulation of the cell did not make the cells ‘switch on’.  Stimulation had to be separated by gaps when the cell was not stimulated.  The breakthrough came when the team ‘began to realise that the important factor was time’. 

 Fields’ research team showed that to form a pathway which would be fixed and therefore remembered, cells had to be repeatedly stimulated and then not stimulated, in a particular pattern.  The length of stimulation was not vital, but the gap between stimulations was.  Fields’ team demonstrated that when three stimulations were separated by two 10 minute gaps, the cells ‘switched on’ and a pathway – a long term memory- was formed.  The key lay in moving away from big blocks of time teaching to ‘spaced learning’, where there was a natural pattern of breaks. He had essentially discovered the basis of much learning.

Creating Spaced Learning

Wel realised the huge potential of this discovery, and decided to put the theory into practice.  We created a team of students to help create resources, and organised the development of the teaching. It was incredibly exciting.  Being the centre of a real-life scientific experiment let everyone involved do real science instead of teaching others people’s discoveries.

 The core structure of spaced learning is based rigidly on Fields’ discoveries, with three stimulations separated by two ten minute gaps:

• Teacher input of key facts/explanations ( and therefore pathway stimulation)
• 10 minute ‘break’ from the input
• Teacher Input  of key facts/explanations
• 10 minute ‘break’ from the input
• teacher input of key facts / explanations

We knew that the brain pathway we were forming could not be stimulated during the ‘breaks’.  So we consulted Terry Whatson of The Open University, who advised physical activities would probably ensure we were stimulating other parts of the brain during the breaks.  We experimented with a variety of different activities for the breaks, to give the pathways we were creating the required gap from stimulation stressed by Field’s research. 

 The teacher inputs in spaced learning can be compressed to cover the precise details that you want the students to remember, allowing you to cover large amounts of theory in a very short time. You are essentially packaging information on the basis of its importance; you are in complete control of the brain stimulation occurring, and therefore what they are learning.  The removal of everything except important learning means that the actual teaching time can be many times faster than normal. In effect, you can cram so much more into each minute of learning.

 The experimental evaluations we carried out showed students were learning complex science very quickly indeed.  We have trialled spaced learning for two years, and the results are consistently positive.  Paul discussed spaced learning with Douglas Fields himself, and was surprised to learn we were the only organisation putting his discoveries into action. 

 We have used this model in a variety of scenarios within school:

• Teaching single topics, notorious for their level of factual content
• Introducing concepts which underpin many ideas
• Teaching  GCSE concepts to KS3 students with no previous knowledge
• A range of different subjects
• Revising entire units of work in preparation for Year 10 GCSE modular exams

The results are very encouraging. In controlled trials, we have shown that it is possible to teach concepts normally covered over several hours, weeks or even months in approximately 30 minutes of actual teaching time.  When we have used spaced learning as a revision technique instead of ‘normal’ revision tasks, we have seen improved exam results.

 But what do the students think of this way of learning? The students liked the experience, and were very positive. Lucy Barratt, one of my students, is quite clear about the benefits: ‘I definitely think it works because so far it has helped me get better grades’. 

 The key point  for teachers and schools is that we can now utilise scientific discoveries to try to improve what we currently do. In terms of fitting our teaching to the way in which the brain learns, we feel that we are only at the very beginning of fundamental changes in education.  The brain is still by far the least understood of all of the body’s organs, yet the one we need to understand in terms of learning.  Cutting edge neurobiological news is breaking all of the time.  We are now in a position to begin to tailor our teaching to the way in which the brain functions.

 In the coming years education may no longer be a case of ‘trial and error’ as to what works and what does not.  The understanding of brain function can undoubtedly inform us and allow us to modify and improve the way in which education is delivered and received.  It may mean radical new approaches very different from how we were taught, or the expectations of OfSTED and others.  Science can inform ideas for new and innovative methods of teaching: we are no longer in the dark.

 When the early evidence for spaced learning was published in Making Minds: What’s wrong with education- and what we should do about it?  (Routledge) James Whitehead and Annette Bartholomew of BBC TV News picked up on it and put spaced learning on the national news. The newspapers took up the story- some saying ‘8 minute lessons’ which rather misses the whole point of spaced learning.  The Daily Mirror ‘s Jeremy Armstrong even joined in, along with students revising for GCSE English.

 Monkseaton created a partnership between neuroscientists, technology and education- The Innovation Trust- to support this work.  Microsoft Education- one of the key partners- supported us to create an IT infrastructure that allowed us to carry out our experiments.  We now have the partners to support our work to show how Science can improve learning: creating solutions, testing them, and now sharing them, and working with interested schools. 

 This is the dawn of a new era for teachers, where their expertise is essential to apply the discoveries of neuroscience in real life, with real learners, drawing on all their experience of young people.  Far from teachers just becoming a passive support for technology-delivered learning, they can look forward to careers developing the future of learning.  Spaced Learning is the first major step towards that goal.

 Angela Bradley is Lead Teacher for neuroscience-based learning and Paul Kelley is Headteacher at Monkseaton High School.

For more on spaced learning, the experiments that have been carried out, and the application of neuroscience to learning, see  Making Minds.

To see spaced learning in action, follow the BBC News spaced learning link on the left.