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How to help children remember new words

By Marina Mele · Reviewed on 18 October 2026

A boy holds up a card with an apple and points to another with a dog, among other picture cards on the table, while a woman beside him listens with a smile.

To write this guide, we looked into what scientific research says about memory and, in particular, what is known about children learning a language. How we did it →

In short

What helps. Two things help a word stick: coming back to it on different days, instead of repeating it many times on the same day, and having the child try to remember the word before you say it again. They are among the most solid findings about memory: several independent reviews, bringing together hundreds of studies, and none that casts doubt on the effect.

With children, most of what we know comes from research in general. Most studies have been done with adults. With children learning a language, we found three studies on spreading words out over different days while they are learning them, and they all point the same way: it helps. On having the child recall the word instead of saying it again, we found no study with children learning a language that we could read, and with words in their own language the results don't agree; the fact that there are few studies doesn't mean it doesn't work with children.

Where studies with adults and with children seem to differ is in how many days to wait between practice sessions. In the few studies that exist with children, going back to the word the next day worked as well as, or better than, waiting eight or ten days. That's why this guide gives you a direction (spread practice out and have the child recall the word) but no schedule. We couldn't find any scientific study behind the most widely repeated schedule (1, 3, 7, 14 and 30 days), nor could we confirm where the number of repetitions said to be needed to learn a word comes from.

What research says

Each section starts with a box saying how well established it is, according to the research:

  • well established: several independent reviews
  • a single review, or a single research team
  • a single study
  • studies disagree
  • no review has looked at it

A review is an article that brings together the studies done on the same question and compares their results. What is known about children is in the text of each section, and where each point comes from is in the “How we know” drop-down at the end of it. In research, spreading practice out is called spaced practice (online, often “spaced repetition”), and having to remember is called retrieval practice.

Where it all starts: forgetting

On Monday, in Spanish class, children learn lunes, martes and miércoles, and by Thursday they may have forgotten them.

Hermann Ebbinghaus measured this forgetting in experiments he published in 1885. His only subject was himself: he learned lists of meaningless syllables and, after a while, measured how much work it took him to learn them again. After 24 hours, he saved only a third of the work: relearning them took him two thirds of the effort it had taken the first time.

Ebbinghaus, testing himself, in experiments he published in 1885.

This experiment is the starting point, not the evidence. Since then, hundreds of studies have tested the two things that help us remember: coming back to the word on different days, and having to recall it. The next two sections cover them.

How we know

How well established, in general: it is a single experimenter, testing himself, more than a century ago. The experiment shows that we forget; it doesn't tell us how much children forget. Source: Ebbinghaus (1885).1

With children learning a language: no study that we have found. And the figure that goes around online, that within 24 hours we forget 70% of what we have learned (see “What people say that isn't quite right”), does not come from any study with children: it is close to Ebbinghaus's figure, but that isn't what he measured.

Spreading practice over different days

well established, especially in adults

Especially in adults, it is one of the best-established findings about memory: if practice is spread over different days, people remember more than if they do the same amount of practice on a single day, and the advantage also shows when they are tested a few days later.

With children learning a language, spacing has been little studied, but the studies that exist find the same as studies with adults. The clearest is a German study: with 65 pupils aged 11 to 13, leaving a day between two sessions, instead of doing both on the same day, meant they remembered more words one week and five weeks later.

How we know

How well established, in general: well established, especially in adults. The main review brings together 271 comparisons (each comparison is a case where a study puts two ways of practising side by side; one study can have several), and 259 find that spreading practice out helps people remember more. Only 12 find no effect or the opposite, although most of the comparisons measure memory on the same day. That the advantage also shows in tests a day or more later is well established too; in a review of second-language studies, the effect is large, although how large is debated.

With children learning a language: few studies (three, from two teams, all with design limitations), and they say the same as in adults. In the German study each schedule was used in a different classroom, so the effect of spacing can't be separated from the effect of the classroom. The other two are from the same team, in Iran, with 30 primary-school children aged 8 to 12 and 28 aged 7 to 11 at an English-language school, and they have design flaws that favour the spaced schedule. The second-language review finds no difference between young learners and adults, but it only has three results from young learners, and the authors urge caution.

With children and words in their own language: two more studies, pointing the same way, one with 33 Dutch children aged 9 and another with 39 Canadian children in 5th grade.

Spacing and asking together: according to a single review, spreading the questions over different days helps people remember more than asking them all on the same day; whether the two together give more than the sum of each one alone could not be tested for lack of studies, although the results are consistent with their effects simply adding up. With children learning a language, the three studies in this section had sessions in which children also had to recall the words, and they point the same way.

Sources: Cepeda et al. (2006);2 Kim and Webb (2022);3 Küpper-Tetzel, Erdfelder and Dickhäuser (2014);4 Lotfolahi and Salehi (2016, 2017);56 Goossens et al. (2012);7 Sobel, Cepeda and Kapler (2011);8 Latimier, Peyre and Ramus (2021).23

Asking for the word works better than saying it again

well established

In general, having to search memory for something helps people remember it better than hearing it or reading it again. The effect is also found in primary school, with all kinds of material.

The speech bubbles have no words: the child could be learning Spanish, Catalan or English.

With children learning a language, we found no study that we could read on the effect of asking for a word compared with simply saying it. With words in their own language, a single research team has found results that don't agree: asking helped in some tests and not in others, and nobody knows why. It is a genuine open question.

In this guide we recommend that you ask for the word before you say it: with children learning a language we found no study that we could read on the effect, but in general it is well established, including in primary school, with all kinds of material.

How we know

How well established, in general: well established (several reviews; the one on classroom studies brings together 222). In primary school, the two reviews that look at the effect of asking find it, with all kinds of material, not only words. A review that only counts studies done in schools has little confidence in this effect, partly because almost all the studies were run by researchers rather than by the children's usual teachers; that review's question, however, is how asking works when the school does it, not whether the effect exists.

With children learning a language: no study that we could read. With children and words in their own language: three studies from a single team, with results that don't agree. Asking helped when the test, a week later, required recalling the word from a clue (in a study with 60 Dutch children aged 9 and in one of the experiments in another, with 122), and it didn't help when the test required choosing the word from several options (although that test came after the other one, and in one of the studies almost all the children got it right). In the largest study, and the one most like a normal class, with 129 children aged 7 to 13, asking gave no advantage over studying the words again in either test, and in one of the year groups, studying them again worked better. Nobody knows whether the difference comes from the kind of test or from how much time had passed.

Sources: Rowland (2014);9 Adesope, Trevisan and Sundararajan (2017);10 Yang et al. (2021);11 Perry et al. (2021);12 Goossens et al. (2014a, 2014b, 2016);131415 Latimier, Peyre and Ramus (2021).23

If they get it wrong, tell them the right word

recommended by every institution that addresses it; studies disagree on how much it adds

If the word doesn't come or they get it wrong, tell them what it was: that way they can keep learning it. Every institution that addresses this recommends it, and none of the reviews that compare it finds that it does harm.

What studies disagree on is the effect on memory of showing them the right answer after they have made the effort to remember the word. In other words, it is common sense that if they don't know the word or get it wrong, you should correct them so they can learn it; what studies differ on is whether showing them the word adds anything, on top of the effort of remembering it, and how much.

How we know

A related study is a study with children learning words in their own language, or another aspect of a language; the others are about the case in this guide: children learning words in a language that isn't their own.

How well established, in general: the studies compare giving the answer after the test with not giving it. Two reviews find an advantage (0.39 without the answer and 0.73 with it; in the classroom, 0.37 and 0.54) and a third finds no difference (0.60 and 0.63), although its authors don't conclude that the answer doesn't help. One of these reviews finds, with little data and only with words that had already been studied, that when the answer is given it helps more in the studies where fewer answers were right. The institutions' recommendations are not independent confirmations: most of them draw on the same two or three sources.

With children learning a language: no study that we could read. With children, a single related study: 18 children in 6th grade at a school in New York, with words that were very difficult for their age, remembered more with the answer, although without the answer they saw the words fewer times; the authors say the children almost certainly knew whether they had got it right without anyone telling them.

Sources: Rowland (2014);9 Yang et al. (2021);11 Adesope, Trevisan and Sundararajan (2017);10 Metcalfe, Kornell and Finn (2009);16 Institute of Education Sciences (2007).17

How many days between one practice session and the next?

how many days to leave is unclear; with children, waiting more days hasn't been shown to work better

We have already seen that spreading practice over different days helps. Here the question is a different one: once practice is spread over different days, should you leave one day or more? It isn't clear. If we count studies with learners of all ages in which practice took place in separate sessions, waiting longer hasn't been shown to work better. There are signs, from a single research team, that the further away the test is, the more time should be left between sessions, and no review by another team has put this to the test.

In three studies with children aged 8 to 13 learning English words, practising the next day worked as well as, or better than, practising after eight or ten days. With so few studies, and all of them with limitations, we don't know the best interval for a child.

Three studies, from two research teams.

At home, you can come back to the word the next day or a few days later. There is no number that works for every child.

How we know

How well established, in general: in adults, well established (two independent reviews), although in one of these reviews, counting all ages, the advantage of the long interval comes from studies where everything is practised in a single session, and with several sessions the long interval doesn't beat the short one. Only one research team has suggested that the best interval gets longer the further away the test is, and no review by another team has put it to the test. A later review, with an author from that team, says there is no ideal schedule that works for everyone.

With children learning a language: three studies, from two teams (in Hong Kong, 52 and 66 children aged 8 and 9; in Germany, 65 pupils aged 11 to 13), and they don't agree with the adult studies on how long to wait, though they do on spacing. The authors of the German study, however, interpret their result in line with the adult studies, following a general rule: the longer something has to be remembered, the longer the best interval. They admit that, at first sight, what they found after five weeks doesn't fit that rule, and that the best interval may also depend on who is learning.

Two more studies point the same way: with 129 Dutch children aged 7 to 13 and words in their own language, spreading the exercises over two weeks was no better than doing them in one; and with children in the UK aged 8 to 11 learning French grammar, practising every seven days gave no clear advantage over practising every three and a half days. Nobody knows why waiting longer doesn't help children; one hypothesis points to working memory.

Sources: Kim and Webb (2022);3 Cepeda et al. (2006);2 Pashler et al. (2007);18 Carpenter, Pan and Butler (2022);19 Rogers and Cheung (2018, 2020);2021 Küpper-Tetzel, Erdfelder and Dickhäuser (2014);4 Goossens et al. (2016);15 Kasprowicz, Marsden and Sephton (2019).22

Which schedule works best?

well established that, on average, a growing wait doesn't help more

Many practice schedules make the wait longer each time: the next day, then a few days later, then a week… On average, a wait that grows doesn't help people remember more than always leaving the same amount of time between sessions. A growing wait may help a little, but if it does, the difference is small.

It's a drawing, not an actual number of days. If a growing wait helps, it's only a little.

With children learning a language, we found no study comparing the two schedules. The only related study we read, a small one with pupils in 3rd and 4th grade learning maths vocabulary, doesn't find a difference between the two schedules either.

no review has looked at it; there are two separate studies

Some schedules adapt to each learner: a word they get wrong comes back sooner, and one they get right comes back later. Whether a schedule like that works better than a fixed one isn't known: two separate studies suggest it does, neither of them with primary-school children.

Bringing a missed word back sooner is common sense, and it's what the three piles in the tips at the end do.

How we know

A growing wait: well established that, on average, there is no difference (three independent reviews), although there may be a small one. With children learning a language, no study; with children, a single small related study, pointing the same way.

A schedule that adapts: no review has looked at it. The two separate studies have limitations: one, with 179 pupils in 8th grade in a Spanish class, has a design that doesn't separate adapting from spacing over time; the other, with 72 university students, used a patented system. With primary-school children, neither.

Sources: Latimier, Peyre and Ramus (2021);23 Kim and Webb (2022);3 Cepeda et al. (2006);2 Petersen-Brown et al. (2019);24 Lindsey et al. (2014);25 Mettler, Massey and Kellman (2016).26

What people say that isn't quite right

We have traced the most widely circulated claims (app websites, language schools, guides for parents, Wikipedia, the press) back to the sources they cite. None of them is based on a study with children. Some have a kernel of truth; others aren't supported by the studies we read. Where we found their origin, we say so.

  • “Without review, we forget 70% in 24 hours.” Half true. The figure is close to Ebbinghaus's, but he didn't measure what he remembered: he measured the work he saved when learning the list again.
  • “Review on days 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30.” We found no study behind this schedule, and the sources it is credited to don't contain it.
  • “The first review should be within the first 24 hours.” It comes from a page by the University of Waterloo's wellbeing and counselling service, which cites no study.
  • “The best moment to review is just before you forget.” It comes from a 1967 proposal for organising courses, not based on any experiment, later cited by the authors of a well-known language app's algorithm. It isn't a finding, although it has a debated kernel: that recalling something that takes effort strengthens it more.
  • “The longer the wait each time, the better.” Research says the opposite: on average, a growing wait gives no advantage over always leaving the same amount of time, although it may give a small one.
  • “Spacing makes you remember two to four times more.” It isn't in the article it is credited to (Cepeda et al., 2006), which gives 47.3% compared with 36.7%.
  • “Spaced repetition is the most effective technique.” A major review of study techniques puts spreading practice out and testing yourself at the same level.
  • “Flashcards with the word and its translation are useless.” In a review of vocabulary activities, with secondary-school and university students, more meanings were remembered a few days later with flashcards than with lists. That said, knowing a word is more than knowing its translation.
  • “A few minutes every day beats one long session a week.” The kernel, spacing, is true, but no page gives a source for the minutes, and none of the reviews we read makes that comparison.
  • “It takes around 17 encounters to learn a word.” We couldn't confirm where it comes from: we couldn't read the 1965 source it is credited to.

And two that are true, at least in adults:

  • “Testing yourself makes things stick better than rereading.” In an experiment with university students, a week later they remembered 61% compared with 40%.
  • “We tend to think what works less well is more effective.” University students learning to recognise painters' styles thought it was more effective to study each painter's paintings one after another, even though spacing them worked better for them.
How we know

Fifteen claims appear in three or more independent sources; here are the ones that relate to this guide. We followed the chains of citations as far as we could; in one case we couldn't read the source. Sources: Ebbinghaus (1885);1 Pimsleur (1967);29 Settles and Meeder (2016);30 Latimier, Peyre and Ramus (2021);23 Cepeda et al. (2006);2 Dunlosky et al. (2013);27 Webb, Yanagisawa and Uchihara (2020);31 Roediger and Karpicke (2006);32 Kornell and Bjork (2008).28

What we don't know

  • The studies we read were done in schools, language schools or labs. None looked at a child practising alone at home with an app, and no institution recommends a spaced-repetition app for children with studies to back it up.

  • The studies we read with children learning a language involve children aged 7 to 13, and in all of them the children were learning English. Only one includes 7-year-olds, and none of the studies we read involves children under 7.

  • They last about five weeks at most. With words in their own language, one test comes eleven weeks later. None of those we read followed children for months learning vocabulary in another language.
  • The best interval for a child: the few studies that exist haven't found that waiting longer helps, but with so few studies we don't know what the best interval is.
  • Whether to tell the child the answer straight away or a little later: in adults, a single review finds no difference on average; with children, a single study, the one with 18 children in 6th grade, finds that giving it later works better.
  • Learning the local language (for example, an English-speaking family living in Catalonia whose child learns Catalan or Spanish because it is the language spoken around them) is a different case: it isn't a foreign language, and we haven't looked at it here.
How we know

Of the seven studies we identified with children learning vocabulary in a foreign language, we read five in full; for the other two, no text was available. We also read eight related studies (children with words in their own language, or with another aspect of a language).

Sources: Kandemir et al. (2026);33 Metcalfe, Kornell and Finn (2009).16

How to apply it at home to learn words

You can do everything this guide describes with a sheet of paper, a few cards or a conversation.

  • A few cards, with the picture on one side and the word on the other. Only a few new cards each time.
  • The first time, you say the word, and the child repeats it.
  • After that, ask for the word before you say it. Show the picture and let the child say the word. If they get it right, let them know: “Yes, perro!”
  • If the word doesn't come, give them a clue: the first sound, a gesture, the first letter if they can already read. If they still can't find it, say it yourself and have them repeat it. Don't leave them unsure.
  • Come back to the same words another day: the next day, or a few days later; not ten times in the same afternoon.
  • Three piles of cards: the ones they still find hard, to practise often; the ones that come with a bit of effort, now and then; the ones they already know, once in a while. If they get one wrong, that card goes back to the first pile.
  • Games where they have to say the word: I spy with words in the language they're learning, a memory game where they name each card they turn over, riddles.
  • Older children can test themselves: look at the picture, say the word, then turn the card over to check whether they got it right.
  • Keep it a game: stop before the child gets bored.
  • Don't go by the “I know this one” feeling just after repeating a word many times: adult learners tend to judge spacing and testing as less useful than they are.
The three piles from the tips above.

And if you want to do it with Parauling

Parauling does what this guide describes. Every word comes back on different days, and the child is always asked: they see the picture or hear the word, and they have to say it or pick it themselves. If they get it wrong, they end up seeing the right one, and the words they miss come back more often. It has courses in Spanish and Catalan, and in English for children learning it at school.

And it takes care of the part that is hardest to keep up at home: it keeps track of which words have come up and which ones the child already knows, chooses which ones are due each day, and has a picture and a voice for every word, which helps when the adult at home doesn't speak the language. With the cards in the album, the child sees the words they are learning. Like any other app, Parauling has not been studied with children using it on their own at home: what we know is what this guide says.

How Parauling works →

Sources

  1. Ebbinghaus (1885; English translation 1913). Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, ch. VII. Teachers College, Columbia University. 

  2. Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354-380. 

  3. Kim and Webb (2022). The effects of spaced practice on second language learning: A meta-analysis. Language Learning, 72(1), 269-319. 

  4. Küpper-Tetzel, Erdfelder and Dickhäuser (2014). The lag effect in secondary school classrooms: Enhancing students' memory for vocabulary. Instructional Science, 42(3), 373-388. 

  5. Lotfolahi and Salehi (2016). Learners' perceptions of the effectiveness of spaced learning schedule in L2 vocabulary learning. SAGE Open, 6(2). 

  6. Lotfolahi and Salehi (2017). Spacing effects in vocabulary learning: Young EFL learners in focus. Cogent Education, 4(1), 1287391. 

  7. Goossens, Camp, Verkoeijen, Tabbers and Zwaan (2012). Spreading the words: A spacing effect in vocabulary learning. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 24(8), 965-971. 

  8. Sobel, Cepeda and Kapler (2011). Spacing effects in real-world classroom vocabulary learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25(5), 763-767. 

  9. Rowland (2014). The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: A meta-analytic review of the testing effect. Psychological Bulletin, 140(6), 1432-1463. 

  10. Adesope, Trevisan and Sundararajan (2017). Rethinking the use of tests: A meta-analysis of practice testing. Review of Educational Research, 87(3), 659-701. 

  11. Yang, Luo, Vadillo, Yu and Shanks (2021). Testing (quizzing) boosts classroom learning: A systematic and meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 147(4), 399-435. 

  12. Perry, Lea, Rübner Jørgensen, Cordingley, Shapiro and Youdell (2021). Cognitive science in the classroom: Evidence and practice review. Education Endowment Foundation. 

  13. Goossens, Camp, Verkoeijen and Tabbers (2014). The effect of retrieval practice in primary school vocabulary learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 28(1), 135-142. 

  14. Goossens, Camp, Verkoeijen, Tabbers and Zwaan (2014). The benefit of retrieval practice over elaborative restudy in primary school vocabulary learning. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 3(3), 177-182. 

  15. Goossens, Camp, Verkoeijen, Tabbers, Bouwmeester and Zwaan (2016). Distributed practice and retrieval practice in primary school vocabulary learning: A multi-classroom study. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 30(5), 700-712. 

  16. Metcalfe, Kornell and Finn (2009). Delayed versus immediate feedback in children's and adults' vocabulary learning. Memory & Cognition, 37(8), 1077-1087. 

  17. Institute of Education Sciences (2007). Pashler, Bain, Bottge et al. Organizing instruction and study to improve student learning (NCER 2007-2004). U.S. Department of Education. 

  18. Pashler, Rohrer, Cepeda and Carpenter (2007). Enhancing learning and retarding forgetting: Choices and consequences. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(2), 187-193. 

  19. Carpenter, Pan and Butler (2022). The science of effective learning with spacing and retrieval practice. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1, 496-511. 

  20. Rogers and Cheung (2018; published 2020). Input spacing and the learning of L2 vocabulary in a classroom context. Language Teaching Research, 24(5), 616-641. 

  21. Rogers and Cheung (2020; published 2021). Does it matter when you review? Input spacing, ecological validity, and the learning of L2 vocabulary. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 43(5), 1138-1156. 

  22. Kasprowicz, Marsden and Sephton (2019). Investigating distribution of practice effects for the learning of foreign language verb morphology in the young learner classroom. The Modern Language Journal, 103(3), 580-606. 

  23. Latimier, Peyre and Ramus (2021). A meta-analytic review of the benefit of spacing out retrieval practice episodes on retention. Educational Psychology Review, 33, 959-987. 

  24. Petersen-Brown, Lundberg, Ray, Dela Paz, Riss and Panahon (2019). Applying spaced practice in the schools to teach math vocabulary. Psychology in the Schools, 56(6), 977-991. 

  25. Lindsey, Shroyer, Pashler and Mozer (2014). Improving students' long-term knowledge retention through personalized review. Psychological Science, 25(3), 639-647. 

  26. Mettler, Massey and Kellman (2016). A comparison of adaptive and fixed schedules of practice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(7), 897-917. 

  27. Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. 

  28. Kornell and Bjork (2008). Learning concepts and categories: Is spacing the “enemy of induction”? Psychological Science, 19(6), 585-592. 

  29. Pimsleur (1967). A memory schedule. The Modern Language Journal, 51(2), 73-75. 

  30. Settles and Meeder (2016). A trainable spaced repetition model for language learning. Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1848-1858. 

  31. Webb, Yanagisawa and Uchihara (2020). How effective are intentional vocabulary-learning activities? A meta-analysis. The Modern Language Journal, 104(4), 715-738. 

  32. Roediger and Karpicke (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255. 

  33. Kandemir, Esposito, Gurgand and Ramus (2026). A meta-analysis of the impact of feedback timing on learning outcomes in computer-assisted learning. Educational Psychology Review, 38(1), 13. 

Published on 18 October 2026. · How we know