Spaced repetition means coming back to material at increasing intervals, just before you would forget it, and testing yourself on it each time. For the ASWB exam it works best at the level of the topic: when a topic comes due, you answer questions on it that you have not seen before, so the review measures whether you understand the statement behind them. Done that way, it combines the two best-supported findings in the research on how people learn.
The two findings behind it
Retrieval beats rereading. In a 2006 study by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, students who practiced recalling a passage remembered 61% of it a week later, against 40% for students who spent the same time rereading it. Pulling an answer out of memory strengthens it in a way that looking at it again does not. Researchers call this the testing effect.
Spacing beats massing. The same hours spread across days produce better long-term memory than the same hours in one block. In a 2008 study led by Nicholas Cepeda, more than 1,350 people learned a set of facts, reviewed them after a gap of anything up to three and a half months, and were tested up to a year later. The best gap grew with how long people needed to remember: about 20 to 40% of the retention interval when the test was a week away, falling to about 5 to 10% when it was a year away.
When John Dunlosky and colleagues assessed ten common study techniques in 2013, those were the two they rated highest: practice testing and distributed practice. Rereading and highlighting, which many students rely on, were rated low.
The catch for a vignette exam
Most spaced-repetition tools work card by card: the same front, the same back, coming round again. That suits vocabulary and drug names. It suits the ASWB exam less well, because the exam never asks you a question you have already seen. It writes a new vignette from the same applied knowledge statement and asks what to do FIRST, so the skill being tested is applying the statement to a situation you have not met.
Re-answering one question also flatters you. By the third time round you recognize the stem and remember the key, and your accuracy rises whether or not your understanding has. It is the same trap as re-sitting a mock you have already taken.
The fix is to space the topic and vary the questions. When a statement comes due, answer two or three questions on it that you have not seen, read every rationale, and judge the review by whether you could explain the reasoning to someone else.
A schedule you can keep
Cepeda's ratios give a rough guide. If your exam is ten weeks away, review gaps of one to two weeks for material you learned early are in the right region, and anything you have only just met needs shorter gaps first. In practice an expanding schedule works for most people:
| Review | When |
|---|---|
| First | The day after you study the topic |
| Second | About three days later |
| Third | About a week later |
| Fourth | Two to three weeks later |
| After that | Once more before the exam, if it is still holding |
If a topic goes wrong at any review, it goes back to the start of the schedule. If it comes back right twice in a row at the longer intervals, treat it as holding and spend the time elsewhere.
Mix the topics within a session
Spacing has a close relative that suits this exam particularly well. In a 2008 study, Nate Kornell and Robert Bjork had people learn the styles of a set of painters, either seeing each painter's works together in a block or mixed in among the others. The mixed group was better at naming the painter of paintings they had never seen. Most participants believed the opposite, that blocked study had worked better for them.
That is the ASWB exam's problem in miniature. On the day, questions arrive mixed: an ethics vignette, then an assessment question, then one on intervention. Part of the skill is recognizing which statement a vignette is testing before you can answer it, and practice in blocks never trains that recognition. Once you have read a topic and answered its questions, do your reviews in mixed sets drawn from across the outline. Dunlosky's review rated interleaved practice as moderately useful, below testing and spacing and well above rereading.
What a review session looks like
A practical session takes fifteen to twenty minutes:
- Clear what is due first. Two or three fresh questions on each topic due today, mixed together.
- Read every rationale, including on the questions you got right.
- Mark each topic as holding, or send it back to the start of the schedule.
- Then move on to new material, if there is time left.
On a heavy day the due list can be long. Do the oldest reviews first, because those are the topics closest to fading, and carry the rest to tomorrow rather than skipping them.
Doing it without an app
A spreadsheet works. Give each statement on your outline a row, with columns for the date you studied it, the date of each review and the result. Each morning, sort by the next review date and clear what is due before you start anything new. The discipline is the hard part: due reviews first, new material second.
The supply of questions is the other constraint. You need enough questions per statement to review it several times without repeating yourself, which is one more reason the size of a question bank matters (how many you actually need). A bank of a few hundred questions runs out of fresh material for a 110-statement outline after one or two rounds of review.
Which topics to space hardest
Three kinds of topic deserve more review than the rest.
The heavy area. Values and Ethics is 35% of every exam except the Clinical, where it is 36%, and it is the area where questions turn most often on which obligation comes first. Its topics are worth an extra review each.
The ones you keep missing. Your error history is the best guide you have. A topic that has gone back to the start of the schedule twice is telling you that more questions alone will not fix it; reread the lesson and then restart the schedule.
The confusable pairs. Some topics are easy to recognize alone and hard to tell apart: projection and displacement among the defense mechanisms, or neighboring stages of change. Review those together in the same session, so that every review asks you to tell them apart, which is exactly what the exam will ask.
How our app does it
Our iOS app schedules review by topic. When a topic comes back, you answer questions on it, often ones you have not seen, and the progress screen reports how many of your scheduled topics are coming back reliably, separately for each content area. Set your exam date and the schedule paces the lessons you have left toward it. Everything is stored on the phone, so the reviews fit into short sessions on a commute with no signal (studying on your phone).
Three mistakes to avoid
Adding new topics faster than you can review them. Every new topic creates reviews for weeks afterward. If the due list grows faster than you clear it, slow the new material down. Skipping reviews throws away the reason for spacing in the first place.
Reviewing only what you like. The topics you avoid are the ones the schedule exists for. If one keeps coming back wrong, reread its lesson before the next review, so you are not answering more questions on it cold.
Cramming at the end. The advantage of spacing is long-term retention, and a final-week cram trades it for a short-lived feeling of fluency. The last two days before the exam should be light review and sleep.
Where spacing meets the rest of your plan
Spacing changes the shape of a study week more than its length. A plan without it reads chapter one in week one and never sees it again until a mock in week eight. A plan with it reads chapter one in week one and meets its topics again, briefly, in weeks one, two, three and five, which costs a few minutes a day and keeps the earliest material from fading while you work through the rest. If you are still working out how many weeks you need overall, the arithmetic is here.
The short version
Test yourself, spread the reviews out, and bring topics back with questions you have not seen. Those are two of the best-supported findings in learning research, applied to an exam that never asks the same question twice.
Roediger, H. L. and Karpicke, J. D. (2006), "Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention", Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T. and Pashler, H. (2008), "Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention", Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095–1102. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. and Willingham, D. T. (2013), "Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology", Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. ASWB Master is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or approved by the Association of Social Work Boards.