The Spacing Effect in Children's Generalization of Knowledge: Allowing Children Time to Forget Promotes Their Ability to Learn

Distributing learning events in time promotes memory to a greater degree than massing learning together in immediate succession, a phenomenon known as the spacing effect. In this article, I review research on the spacing effect in children's acquisition and generalization of conceptual knowledge. For decades, researchers hypothesized that spaced learning should deter generalization because the forgetting that occurs between learning events limits children's ability to retrieve prior learning. However, new research suggests that spaced learning promotes children's generalization and implicates forgetting as the mechanism that supports, rather than deters, children's generalization. This work counters the intuitive assumption that forgetting uniformly constrains children's learning, suggesting instead that forgetting is a domain-general process that promotes cognitive development.