Which practice specifically involves spacing study sessions to improve long-term retention?

• A. Retrieval practice
• B. Spacing
• C. Interleaving
• D. Encoding

Answer: (B)

Spacing study sessions leverages the spacing effect: by reviewing material after breaks, you force your memory to be retrieved again after it has begun to fade. That effort strengthens the memory trace and makes it more durable, which improves long-term retention compared with cramming. In practice, you revisit the material days or weeks apart, with intervals lengthening as you become more confident. The other techniques serve different purposes: retrieving information through testing helps solidify recall, interleaving mixes topics to improve discrimination and transfer, and encoding is about how you initially process and encode information. But when the focus is on distributing study over time to boost how well you remember later, spacing is the specific approach.