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“Our system employs a symbiotic collection of highly effective pedagogical techniques such as distributed practice, layering and mixed review.”

Instead, students and teachers might discover the rewards of distributed practice, returning again and again to the same material while adding more depth and nuance each time.

Both distributed practice and interleaving enhance learning in part because they introduce what University of California, Los Angeles, psychologist Robert Bjork has termed “desirable difficulties”—that is, they make learning harder.

The first is distributed practice, or spacing out exposures to the material to be learned at intervals spread out in time.

The opposite of distributed practice—cramming—is the technique that now reigns in schools, and that’s true for a reason.