Spacing versus Massing: Let's Look at Art

In “Learning Concepts and Categories: Is Spacing the ‘Enemy of Induction’?”, Kornell and Bjork (2008), initially explored the influence of spacing on inductive learning and secondarily the impact of massing and interleaving. The authors anticipated that spacing learning sessions would reduce induction because people would be less able to recognize the categories or groupings. For one experiment, they had participants study 6 paintings each by 12 artists with half the artists’ paintings presented in a “mass” grouping and the other half “interleaved” with other artists’ paintings and thus “spaced.” In a related experiment, they presented all the works to a participant either massed or spaced. They asked the groups to indicate which artist has painted the works thus discriminating between categories. Afterwards, they asked the first group which of the massing or spacing processes had felt most effective for their learning. Finally, they presented new paintings and asked the participants to link these to the artists to explore their learning into application.

The first major finding is that participants performed better in the spacing process, even though they rated the massing processing as more effective. This makes sense as I hear students report to me that “all night cramming sessions” are building their knowledge even though I see better academic results when studying is spaced. In this “illusion” of learning, we can see that what may feel satisfying to learning may not produce the greatest effects. Perhaps because spacing is a desirable difficulty that produces more challenge, yet transfer this learning into memory.

A second interesting point is that in the experiment it is hard to discern whether it was the spacing or the interleaving which had the greatest impact on the memory process. The participants saw paintings that were spaced and mixed in with other artists, so could it be the discrimination of categories which helped build the ability to pick apart different artists’ work even more than the spacing? Further research is needed, but it can be assumed that pairing the two methods produces a significant positive impact on learning.

References

Kornell, N, & Bjork, R.A. (2008).Learning Concepts and Categories: Is Spacing the ‘‘Enemy of Induction’’?. Psychological Science , 19(6), 585-592.