After describing what I'm doing with RTK at my school, I've somehow ended up being strongly encouraged to give a 30 minute presentation to other teachers about it. While I kind of stuck my foot in my mouth, I'm also kind of glad to be forced to learn more about the theory and nuts and bolts behind spaced repetition systems. So, my question to you all is does anyone have access to or know where I can find research on this topic. I'm especially interested in research results published in education journals or books with data showing the method is effective. For example, research that compares students using SRS with students that don't (i.e. a control group) would be really interesting. Is there any out there? Anyone know of any good references that might help me? Good URLs will also be appreciated.
Cheers,
Andy

I have seen a couple journal articles, so I know they are out there, but unfortunately I don't know where I found them! I would recommend checking the wikipedia page on spaced repetition to get some names and terms and stuff to search for, and also check the supermemo website which has lots of articles.

Psychologists Bahrick, and Landauer & Bjork have done some classic studies titled something like "Maintenance of foreign language vocabulary and the spacing effect" and "Optimum rehearsal patterns and name learning". If you have access to any academic libraries you should be able to find them. I used to have them but can't find them at the moment.
EDIT: If you go for one try to find the Bahrick. They used Spanish vocab with English speakers, different spacing intervals etc.

Again I can't help with any links, but I do remember reading articles on the topic where students were asked to learn pairs of random collections of letters. The groups had different repetition rates and then had a test several months later. You'll never guess what the result was!!

EDIT: It would appear this guy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus
did experiments on himself with the letters...

Hello takoman,

you might want to get access to a journal article database where you can search systematically for articles by keywords. While you can find those articles with google you often can not access them. However, university libraries often offer access to certain databases and journals if you have a library card.
The "Arts & Humanities Citation Index" looks promising, for example.

Most certainly there is a dissertation already written about this topic and this would be a very good start or even fully sufficient.

Good luck, Silmara

A quick search of academic papers reveals the following testing of spaced repetition theory (you'll need an athens subscription or equivalent):

"THE EFFECT OF SPACED REPETITION ON MEANINGFUL RETENTION.
" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14316956 also see the related articles section on the right of the entry

Some researchers are listed in the wikipedia page, and academic papers by each of them listed under their individual entries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piotr_Wozniak

also here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimsleur_la...References

If you need full journal texts and dont have access of your own, let me know and I'll send you the full pdfs of the best papers