Bite-Sized Learning: Guide and Benefits

ReadPartner Team

March 20, 2025

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Bite-Size Learning & How to Reduce Training Time

The modern world is a fast-paced and ever-changing environment. That means that on the one hand, being able to constantly learn and study is almost mandatory to keep up and not lose relevance. On the other hand, with the amount of responsibilities and duties, it is very hard to find the time for proper study, let alone the energy and focus to sit down for at least an hour and immerse yourself in a complex subject. And that is where the benefits of bite-sized learning come in.

What is bite-sized learning

Bite-sized learning is an approach to studying that involves breaking educational content down into small, easily digestible chunks of information. Each learning or training session is short, ranging from 5 to 20 minutes, and it only covers a single concept or skill.

The idea of bite-sized training was developed to align the learning process with the habits and lifestyle of modern people and by doing this, increase engagement and information retention in students, improving the overall effectiveness of the learning process. It is based on several key principles:

Cognitive load theory

The main idea taken from the cognitive load theory is that the brain can process only a limited amount of information at once. This is why bite-sized learning advocates much shorter learning sessions than traditional lessons. It helps prevent cognitive overload and, as a result, improves comprehension and retention.

Attention spans

Staying focused on one thing for long is difficult, even more so with the amount of distractions we have nowadays. Disruptions in attention have negative effects on learning because they interfere with the process of memorization. The shorter sessions of the bite-sized learning approach limit the amount of time the student has to stay focused, making it easier to stay engaged with the material and reducing the chances of the learner switching their attention to something else.

Flexibility and convenience

Bite-sized learning was developed, in large part, to accommodate the busy schedules of modern people. Not everyone can set an hour aside for learning, but a 15-minute session is much more manageable and easier to fit into a tight schedule. This method allows more people to access learning without disrupting their days or diminishing their work performance.

Effectiveness of bite-sized learning

Bite-sized learning is gaining popularity both among learners and educators. A study on effect of Bite-Sized Teaching (BST) on learner engagement and learning in postgraduate medical education found that 79.8% of course takers reported BST as one of the best learning formats in the curriculum, with 76.1% reporting that they incorporate what they learned via BST into their own teaching.

The growing popularity of this teaching and learning method is not a surprise: bite-sized learning offers a much easier and more convenient way to cover new information while keeping the effectiveness of learning on par with other methods, and in some cases even enhancing the learning outcomes. A study by Dr. Aimee Jacobs, et al found that supplementing the statistics course with bite-sized materials delivered through TikTok videos had a measurable result on the course takers, improving their scores significantly.

How to learn in bite-sized chunks

One of the biggest benefits of bite-sized learning is its accessibility. This approach is not very complicated in its design, so it does not take a lot of effort to transform your studies into bite-sized chunks. Bite-sized training can be used both by teachers and students, whether they are taking a course or learning independently on their own.

Structuring your studies according to the approach will require some preparation time, but once you are ready to go, all you will need is to set aside around 15 minutes for your studying sessions every day, or every weekday if you wish to rest on the weekends. The preparation can be done in the following fashion:

Set a clear learning goal and understand the knowledge involved

The first step is very simple: formulate what you wish to learn. Then, you need to think about what concepts and skills need to be acquired to be able to perform that. The trick here is to focus only on the most important and crucial ideas without covering every little detail.

As a teacher with in-depth knowledge of the subject, it should not be too hard to find the key concepts you need, but what if you want to study a new subject on your own? Of course, you could read a full article or watch a full video explaining what knowledge and skills are involved in a particular subject, and then isolate the most important parts, but that defeats the purpose of bite-sized learning in a way since you have to cover the material in all its detail first.

Fortunately, we live in the digital age, and there are tools you can use to isolate the most important information. ReadPartner is an AI tool designed to create summaries of articles and YouTube videos. It does that by finding the most important information in the content it analyzes, and then it presents that information to the user in a clear and concise way.

Once you understand the key concepts and skills needed, you are ready to move on to the next step of preparation.

Split the concepts and skills you wish to learn into small, easily digestible chunks

There is no one rule on where and how to split the content, so the split is somewhat arbitrary. The main idea here is to make sure that the content of a single chunk can be understood easily within the timeframe of 10 minutes maximum.

Let’s say that you want to learn how to write a specific program, and during step one, you find that you will need to study “arrays” or “lists”: a way of storing larger amounts of data in programming. This is a large topic with a lot of knowledge and nuance involved so you need to split it into chunks, for example, the following way:

Your first chunk can be learning how to create an array. Here, you do not need to learn how arrays work and how you can manipulate them, just focus on simply creating them and nothing else.
The next chunk can be learning to perform a single operation on the arrays you have created, for example adding data to them. Again, do not cover any additional information, focus on the single task of adding new data.
Next, you can cover another single operation, for example removing data from arrays.
Keep doing this until you cover everything you need to know about arrays.

The main idea of bite-sized learning when creating these chunks is, again, to focus on the most important information only, so it can be covered in 10 minutes or less. ReadPartner can help create these chunks for you as well: find the information you need and summarize it with ReadPartner to receive the distilled version you need to learn in one session.

Include practice time

Every learning session should have some practice time. Generally, you want to keep the learning time at about 10 minutes and spend around 5 minutes after it to practice what you have covered. For example, if you learned how to create an array, spend a few minutes just creating a number of them. Once you learn how to add data to them, spend some time adding data to the arrays you created during the previous session. Just remember not to go over 20 minutes with your overall session time.

Incorporate spaced repetition

Spaced repetition involves reviewing the information studied several times at systematic intervals. This helps with retention immensely, reinforcing memory with repetition of the same material multiple times, and eliminates the forgetting that occurs when information is not encountered or used for extended periods of time.

Spaced repetition is not an intrinsic part of bite-sized learning and it can be used with other methods of learning. However, it is highly recommended to use bite-sized learning together with spaced repetition, as they complement each other well. This will help you immensely to retain the knowledge you acquire.

Spaced repetition programs

Spaced repetition can be done in a number of ways. You can use different services that provide frameworks for spaced repetition, adjusting review times based on the difficulty of recalling the information. There are many available, so simply choose the one you like the most, and go with it.

How to schedule spaced repetition yourself

If you do not wish to use a third party to keep track of your review schedules, you can do it yourself with pen and paper, a document, or a calendar. One of the most popular algorithms for spaced repetition is SM-2, and most services that provide spaced repetition have algorithms based on this one. You can read the full version of the algorithm if you wish, but we suggest a simplified version for pen and paper:

Start your first review 1 day after you learn the material

If you can recall the information, double the review period
‍If your previous review period was 1 day, review in 2 days. If you successfully recall in 2 days, review again in 4, and so on. Keep repeating this until you feel confident you will not forget the information. In theory, you could do this indefinitely, but we feel going over a month of review period with pen and paper just might be too much upkeep.

If you have serious difficulty recalling the information at any point, shorten the review period by dividing it in half
‍If your review period was 8 days, but you could only partially remember the information, set your next review period to 4 days, and go from there. If after 4 days you successfully recall everything, keep multiplying your review period by 2.

If you completely forget something, quickly cover the information one more time and set the review period back to 1 day
‍When using spaced repetition together with bite-sized learning, we advise against using spaced repetition for every chunk of information you cover. Instead, it is better to use spaced repetition when you cover an entire topic that you divided into chunks.

An even simpler alternative to use together with bite-sized learning

Whatever spaced repetition algorithm you choose, it will require some time and effort to track. Because of this, we will suggest a very simple repetition schedule. It is not tried and tested like other algorithms, but it will require no upkeep while still providing the main benefits.

Start every learning session of your bite-sized learning course by recalling what you studied in the previous session.
Once a week, set aside a learning session where you do not cover any new information at all, but instead review everything you covered the previous week.
When you cover an entire topic, set a session where you will review the previous topic.

As you can see, this algorithm is very simple, but it still incorporates the main idea of spaced repetition: you review the information multiple times with increasing intervals. Feel free to adjust this to your studies in any way you see fit, we are simply sharing the general idea. Just remember to review not what you studied last, but what you studied second to last. So on day two, you review day one, on week two you review week one, and when you finish topic two, review topic one.

Conclusion

The benefits of bite-sized learning are evident: it is a learning approach that has proven its effectiveness, and it is gaining more and more popularity because it is easy to use, it replaces long and difficult lessons with short, easy-to-understand chunks of information, not only making studying less of a chore, but shortening training time, and it fits the busy schedules of modern people much better than traditional lessons.

FAQ

How long should a bite-sized learning session be?

5 to 20 minutes is the typical range for bite-sized learning sessions. The training time is adjusted based on the complexity of the chunk you are studying. Going over 20 minutes is not advisable, however, as this leans more towards traditional learning.

Can bite-sized learning work for complex subjects?

Yes, absolutely! Even if you are studying rocket science quite literally, you can split it into short and digestible chunks: “What is a rocket?”, “How rockets move: Newton’s third law”, “Types of rockets: solid vs. liquid fuel”, “Key parts of a rocket”. Keep going with simple chunks like these, and you will be an expert on rockets in no time!

What are some good bite-sized learning examples?

Learning one new word in a foreign language each day instead of memorizing a list of vocabulary on a topic, learning one Excel function a day instead of covering many at once, learning about a single historical event a day instead of a whole period, are all great examples of bite-size learning.