For students trying to remember something for six months, the immediate practice session (which produced a 27 percent final score) is not bad at all. But as the delay increases to twenty-eight days, the students’ scores double. This pattern appears in numerous studies, although the ideal delay changes depending upon the final test date. There is a complex balance between the advantages of nearly forgetting and the disadvantages of actually forgetting, and it breaks our forgetting curve in half:11
