Overlearning

Overlearning is the practice of continuing to rehearse a newly acquired skill or piece of knowledge beyond the point where it has first been mastered. Hermann Ebbinghaus's pioneering research into the forgetting curve in the late nineteenth century quantified overlearning in terms of the number of extra repetitions needed to reach one hundred percent recall accuracy. A 1992 meta-analysis found that overlearning meaningfully extends how long material can later be recalled, but more recent research suggests the benefit is often temporary: studies on geography facts and word definitions found that the advantage lasted only about a week before fading, and overlearning was found to be ineffective for the durable retention of mathematics skills compared with distributed practice, in which study sessions are spaced out over time. Overlearning therefore reliably boosts performance in the short term, but researchers have questioned how efficient a study strategy it really is for producing lasting, long-term knowledge compared to alternatives such as spaced practice.