Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm 
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.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.)<p>Yet, despite how dramatic the effects are, nobody listens and nobody takes advantage of it.