In: Psychology
discuss the issues of cramming for a test versus distributed learning?
Massed practice is studying a large amount of information over a small amount of time, is basically massed practice. This involves the cramming of a piece of information in our brain as fast as possible. Cramming may seem a good idea for a test or a quiz as it can help us out temporarily but as soon as we take that test we have been cramming for the information we think we learned disappears because it never registered into our long-term memory. Hence for short-term cramming is helpful, when it is time for our midterms or finals and we cannot recall any of the information learned and this creates problem. This is where distributed learning comes into the picture as in this methods we study small amounts of information over a long period of time, by basically spreading the information out over time. This type of studying registers the information in our mind and is helpful in its retrieval.