Rethinking Twitter: Unique Characteristics of Twitter Render It an Instructional Asset

Background

Studies that date back to over 130 years ago in the fields of psychology and education have examined the effects of spacing the study of concepts versus providing comprehensive information at one time. German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus (1885) studied memory and practice effect by testing subjects on their recall of nonsense syllables. Chief among his conclusions was the formation of a concept called serial position effect, which included recency and primacy. The recency effect describes the increased recall of the most recent information because it is still in the short-term memory. The primacy effect causes better memory of the first items in a list due to increased rehearsal and commitment to long-term memory. While the definition of spaced versus massed practice is subjective, Underwood (1961) determined that spaced practice occurred when trial intervals are greater than fifteen seconds; massed practice (MP), when intervals are two to eight seconds.

Dempster (1989) found that “spacing effects can best be understood in terms of the ‘accessibility’ hypothesis, and that spaced repetitions have considerable potential for improving classroom learning” (p. 309). The accessibility hypothesis states that memory will be accurate when the ease of accessibility is correlated with memory behavior; however, if the ease of processing is not correlated with memory in a given task, then the judgments will not be accurate (Schwartz, 1994). The theory dates back to studies conducted by Tulving and Pearlstone (1966) that worked with cued recall. Their study demonstrated that subjects who were non-cued had information reach their memory stage but not their retrieval stage in contrast to those who received spaced cues.

Studies by Estes (1955), Glenberg (1979), Raaijmakers (2003), and Pavlik and Anderson (2005) found that by increasing the spacing of practice, subjects had improved recall. Likewise, Bahrick (1979) found that when spacing was moved closer together the recall of subjects worsened. This research suggests that the timing of reviews by instructors should be spaced increasingly further apart to improve performance.