Hello! I hope you’re doing well.
If you missed last week’s post, you can find an article that I wrote about studying for exams here. It focuses on cramming, and how to avoid it. A big part of the article also discusses the issue of forgetting.
It reminded me that while I’ve mentioned the importance of forgetting in several of these updates, I’ve never focused an entire piece on the forgetting curve. That’s strange, as it’s one of the first things I mention in many CPD talks.
Indeed, the rapid forgetting that so often happens in education is one of the reasons we need effective techniques like retrieval practice. More on that later!
The Forgetting curve
So, what is the forgetting curve?
First discovered by German researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1880s, it plots the amount remembered and forgotten by a learner over time.
Here’s a widely-used image:
The key idea is that recall (or memory, as it’s been labelled here) is at or close to 100% at the start – immediately after a period of study, such as when you have just read a passage or studied a set of words. This is shown on the left of the graph.
It’s what happens next that’s interesting and important.
Over the next hours and days, forgetting proceeds very rapidly, as you can see from the shape of the curve. Our ability to recall the studied information drops dramatically in the period immediately after study.
The curve eventually becomes shallower (the lower right of the graph), indicating that if things are still remembered after a few days or more, they are less likely to be forgotten after that point.
This means that what happens immediately after studying is crucial. Otherwise, the hard work done in class (or independent study) could be undone.
Tackling Forgetting
Forgetting is a practical problem, but one that we can solve. The main issues are:
Failing to follow up study sessions after a suitable delay.
Using ineffective study strategies that promote temporary ‘performance’ (see update #7).
Unfortunately, these issues are all too common! Students work hard, they can answer their teacher’s questions and do tasks at the time…but much of this is soon forgotten.
This is the ‘folly’ of forgetting. All the hard work will be for nothing if students forget everything they worked on.
It’s also where desirable difficulties come in. Spacing out practice and using effective strategies like retrieval and variation can help to counteract that forgetting. They get things to stick in a way that lasts.
On that issue, a fairly chunky extract on desirable difficulties from my recent book on memory was shared in the following article recently. Check it out below:
MindShift: Strategies for Bringing 'Desirable Difficulty' Into Learning
Enjoy, and please consider sharing with colleagues!
Well, that’s it for this time.
Next week, I’ll share the slides from my recent talk at researchED Aberdeen (Scotland). If you like collecting slides rather than actually attending conferences, this one is for you! 😅 And I’ll also be announcing my next few talks. Hope you can make it to one of those.
All the best for the coming week,
Jonathan
Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.