Spaced repetition: remember for months, not days
Reviewing just before you'd forget, with longer gaps each time, keeps knowledge for the long term.
5 min read
You forget most new things quickly: a large part within the first days, then more slowly. This is the forgetting curve, first measured by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1880s. Each time you successfully recall something, it fades more slowly afterwards.
Spaced repetition uses this: review an item just before you'd forget it, then wait longer before the next review. A card might come back after one day, then three, then a week, then a month.
What the research says
Hundreds of studies agree that spreading practice out beats massing it together, often by a wide margin, and that the best gap grows with how long you need to remember.
Cepeda et al. (2006), “Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks”, Psychological Bulletin; Cepeda et al. (2008), “Spacing effects in learning: a temporal ridgeline”, Psychological Science.
How to do it
Turn what you learn into questions.
Flashcards, quiz items, or facts you add yourself.Review a little every day.
Ten minutes daily works far better than an hour once a week.Grade yourself honestly.
The schedule is only as good as your answers.Add new material steadily.
A few new cards a day keeps reviews short.
Doing it in Qenot
Recall does the scheduling for you. Everything you answer in flashcards and quizzes joins it automatically, and each day it shows only what's due.
Try it in Qenot
Open RecallCommon questions
Why not just review everything the night before?
Cramming works for a day and then fades fast. Spreading the same reviews over weeks gives far better results on the day and long after it.
How does Qenot decide when to show a card?
It uses FSRS, a modern scheduling algorithm. Each answer you give updates its estimate of how well you know the card, and it shows the card again when you're likely to be about to forget it.