http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818367
In grad school I managed to take advantage of the pacing effect in an
educational setting. I was teaching linear algebra. What I did was make
the homework incremental - 1/3 of homework on today's material, 1/3 on
the previous week, and 1/3 anything in the course. Those thirds were in
increasing order of difficulty.

I also started every class with a question/answer period. The rules were
simple, the questioning will last at least 10 minutes, and you don't
want me to ask the questions. :-) Anything that had come up in the
questions that seemed to be a point of confusion was sure to be added to
the next homework set.

I won't go into what else I did with that class, but the end result is
worth thinking about. First note that I gave a ridiculously hard final.
Other grad students who saw it thought that the class would bomb.
Secondly they aced the test. What do I mean by aced? Well I had a bonus
question which fellow grad students thought nobody would get. 70% of the
class got that question, and a good fraction were over 100% on the test.
So they must have studied hard, right? Nope. I ran into some students
several months later. They told me that they tried to study for the
final and stopped after a few minutes because it was useless, they knew
everything. And several months later they still knew much of the
material cold!

The thing is that none of what I did was very radical. The principles
have been known for a century. Psychologists have been trying to get
people to listen for that long. I learned about it in the 80s from a
university course I watched on TV. (British Columbia had a TV channel
devoted to lectures for correspondence courses.)

Yet, despite how dramatic the effects are, nobody listens and nobody
takes advantage of it.