Exploring the Impact of Spacing in Mathematics Learning through Data Mining

Laboratory studies suggest that long term retention of Mathematics learning is enhanced by spaced, as opposed to massed, practice. However, little evidence has been evinced to demonstrate that such spaced learning has a positive impact in real world learning environments, at least partly because of entrenched pedagogy and practice, whereby students are encouraged to engage with Mathematics in a very sequential manner thus leading to massed learning episodes. Indeed, much educational practice and the structure of Mathematics textbooks lend themselves to massed rather than spaced learning. However, in online learning such spaced practice is possible and more practically achieved. Predicting learner outcomes from data in a popular online Mathematics learning site shows that in this data set spacing seems to have a negative effect on retention at a later time.