[prize] Spaced Repetition literature review

jsalvatier

EDIT: I am canceling this contest because I feel that the structure of the incentives were poorly thought out (see gwern's comments). I will be posting a new better structured contest in the near future (now posted). If you feel this is unfair or otherwise feel slighted, please contact me at my username at gmail.com.

I'm interested in making projects happen on Less Wrong. In order to find out what works and to inspire others to try things too, I'm sponsoring the following small project:

Spaced Repetition is often mentioned on on Less Wrong as a technique for remembering things. I've started using Anki and it certainly seems to be useful. However, I haven't seen a good summary of evidence on Spaced Repetition.

I hereby offer a prize to the first person to submit a good summary of the evidence on Spaced Repetition to the main page. The winner will get the prize, currently: $265 + 40 to charity (see comments)

The summary should address at least the following questions:

What spacing is best?
How much does spaced repetition actually help memory?
Does spaced repetition have hidden benefits or costs?
Does the effectiveness vary across domains? How much?
Is there research on the kinds of questions that work best?
What questions do researchers think are most important?
Is there any interesting ongoing research? If so, what is it on?
What, if any, questions do researchers think it is important to answer? Are there other unanswered questions that would jump out at a smart person?
What does spaced repetition not do that people might expect it to?

The post should summarize the state of current evidence and provide citations to back up the claims in the article.

If you think you would benefit from the result of this project, please add to the prize! You can contribute to the prize on the ChipIn page.

Whether the summary is 'good' will be judged by me. If there is a serious dispute, I'll agree to dispute resolution by any uninvolved party with more than 5k karma.

If you have suggestions, questions or comments, please leave them in the comments.

If you would like to work on this project, please say so in the comments below. Collaboration is encouraged.

This project is tagged with the 'project' tag and listed on the Projects wiki page.