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The consolidation break after learning

    Sprache lernen im Vorübergehen! Lernposter

    The time after the daily learning is also important, then every student should let what they have learned sink in and take at least twenty minutes of a consolidation break without any activity in order to be able to process what they have learned internally.

    Today we know that the phase that follows a learning process is at least as important for lasting learning success as the learning itself. Modern imaging techniques show that after learning, exactly the same areas of the brain are activated again that were active during learning before. In this process, however, the knowledge is not transferred one-to-one to the cerebrum, but the content is condensed, recoded and interconnected.

    The realization of the time delay between knowledge acquisition and storage in the brain has consequences for learning that are still hardly considered today. The most important are sufficient sleep and many short learning units with breaks in between, rather than a learning marathon on the weekend.


    By the way, many children and young people devote themselves more or less intensively to Facebook, Instagram or other digital offerings immediately after their schoolwork or learning phases. In one experiment, young people were made to memorize vocabulary lists, with one group of young people taking a concentrated rest period afterwards; in the second case, the participants were allowed to go online immediately and engage with the aforementioned media. It was shown also in this case that the first group had memorized successfully, but the second had forgotten much more.