Why Your WordPress Quizzes Need Spaced Repetition

Most online courses on WordPress websites treat quizzes as a one-time event. Students take a quiz, get a score, and move on. A week later, most of what they learned is gone. It’s not a motivation problem or an issue with the quality of your course; it’s just how human memory works. Spaced repetition is one of the best ways to fix it.

In this post, we’ll cover what spaced repetition is, why it works, and how WordPress course creators can start implementing it.

The forgetting curve is real

Without review, learners forget approximately 2/3 of new information within 24 hours and 3/4 within a week (source). That should be terrifying for any course creator, because it means your students will only remember 25% of your lessons in a week, and even less the further out you measure. That’s the “forgetting curve”; the longer it’s been since you learn something, the more you will forget.

Fortunately, there’s a flip side. Studies have found that reviewing the material at later intervals helps to flatten the curve. Review lessons at the right time, and forgetting slows down dramatically. Review it a few times at widening intervals, and students are more likely to remember the knowledge months, or even years, in the future.

That’s essentially what “spaced repetition” means. Review previously learned material at increasing intervals, with the review timed to when learners are more likely to start forgetting things.

Why it matters for WordPress courses

If you run an online course on a WordPress site, spaced repetition should play an important role for your platform.

Students don’t come back to courses on their own, and you don’t want everything you teach to be lost to the forgetting curve. Once a lesson is marked complete, it’s out of sight. Without some kind of structured review, students simply won’t derive much benefit from your courses.

Online courses are a competitive market, and one of the biggest ways to differentiate your curriculum isn’t with high production quality or content volume, but by having learners who retain and apply what they learned. Those are the courses that students remember, and that they recommend, renew, and rate highly. Moreover, no other LMS or quiz plugins for WordPress are doing this. Offering something that no other platforms are doing is a very significant competitive advantage.

How PressPrimer Quiz handles spaced repetition

Good implementation of spaced repetition comes down to adhering to a handful of evidence-based principles. Reviews need to start early (within 24 hours, when most information is forgotten) and expand from there. Scheduling should be on a per-question basis, not per quiz, because students remember information differently. Each question’s next review should be based on how well the student actually knew it, so how often they answer quiz questions correctly that are based on that material. Sessions should stay short, around 10 to 20 minutes, to avoid fatigue and frustration. The review itself should also be based on active recall, not passive reading—making quizzes the perfect fit.

That’s the playbook we used when we built the feature into the School add-on for PressPrimer Quiz. Under the hood, it uses the “SM-2” algorithm, which tracks each student’s performance on every individual question and then calculates when that question should be shown again to the student. If the student gets it wrong, the system sets a short schedule for them to see it again. If they get it right, they don’t see it again for a longer period. Every question moves through three mastery states: Learning, Reviewing, and Mastered.

To get started, edit any quiz in PressPrimer Quiz, then turn on Enable Spaced Repetition from the Premium Settings tab. Once it’s on, every completed attempt updates mastery for the questions that the student answered.

Students get their own review dashboard, which you can add to any page using the PPQ Spaced Repetition Review block or the [pressprimer_quiz_sr_review] shortcode. When questions are due, students see a Start Review Quiz button, which pulls up to 20 questions into a fresh quiz in Tutorial mode. PressPrimer Quiz also has built-in email reminders, which can be set up under PressPrimer Quiz > Settings > Email. Instructors get access to a Spaced Repetition report in PressPrimer Quiz > Reports, where they can filter by group, quiz, or student, and see mastery results and trends over time.

For full setup details, make sure to check out the Spaced Repetition article in the Knowledge Base.

No other WordPress solution offers anything similar, so we’re really excited to be able to offer this important tool to WordPress educators. Visit the School add-on page to see everything else included in the plugin. Let us know how you’re using the Spaced Repetition feature in the comments!