I am teaching Linear Algebra this semester, with pre-recorded classes and weekly meetings, and the students have a few short and simple exercises to solve every week, which count a bit (20%) to their final course grade.
This was designed in order to make sure that the students study a bit every week, and do not postpone studying the subject to the very last minute, as experience tells me and my colleagues that this is extremelly inefficient, specially in a (relatively) abstract course as Linear Algebra (this course focuses on abstract finite-dimensional Linear Algebra, with reduced use of matrices and linear systems, which are studied in a previous course).
However, I noticed that most student just leave their weekly assignments to the very last minute. Out of 51 students, only 2 have even opened this week's assignment assignments, which are due on Sunday, as of Friday.
As expected, the previous assignments grades are low, bordering on 60% mark. I should also add that they can take the weekly assignments as many times as they want to improve their grades, and the assignments are quite easy.
So I am looking for references (articles published in reputable peer-reviewed journals) which discuss the different practices of studying; e.g. comparing studying a bit every day vs accumulating a lot of material to study all at once, and how those different approaches affect mathematics learning.
I'm not even sure of what terms I should be looking for, as this is not my are of expertise, but I found that "cramming" seems to be related to the second approach mentioned above. All I could find were a few articles mentioning that cramming can be effective for students who already have good study habits, or for areas other than mathematics.
tl;dr:
I'm looking for reputable articles comparing different ways of studying mathematics (spacing out the material or condensing it).