What not to forget when going back to school

Gemisha Cheemungtoo


For most of us, September brings about one major event: going back to school. It marks the end of the summer holidays, the beginning of autumn and for me specifically, a school supply haul. Some of you might be preparing to return to a socially distanced classroom, whilst others are welcomed back via online classes. So as we get ready to learn again this academic year, how much of last year's content can we actually recall? 

 

We've all heard of a learning curve, that can be particularly steep if you are new to a subject or topic. How familiar are you with the forgetting curve, however?

 

The forgetting curve is a mathematical model that demonstrates how our memory of learned knowledge degrades over time. Published by a key German psychologist by the name of Herman Ebbinghaus in 1885, he conducted an experiment on himself to test learning retention. The graph produced has been well known to the field of psychology and has stood the test of time when replicated by scientists in Amsterdam. 

 

Ebbinghaus' method consisted of memorising lists of 'nonsense' syllables: short words that were without meaning, to prevent any associative learning affecting the experiment. Different nonsense syllables were learned and relearned over different time intervals, ranging from 20 minutes to 31 days. He then measured the time it took to recall each row of syllables perfectly and analysed the results for each time interval. 

 

Image from: https://qz.com/1213768/

 

From the reconstruction of Ebbinghaus' results above, you can see that the greatest rate of forgetting occurs within the first day itself. From that point onwards, the rate of loss is much slower, meaning that we might only remember around a quarter of our knowledge gained a month after learning. The best way to retain that information for as long as possible might be through the concept of spaced repetition, a technique of reviewing material at increasingly lengthened time frames to prevent forgetting. 

 

There are also a few factors that can affect the rate of forgetting. First is the relation of the new content to what the learner already knows, also known as associative learning. As mentioned earlier, Ebbinghaus controlled this factor by memorising artificial words, but it is easier to remember something new if it can be linked or built upon your network of prior knowledge. 

 

The replication experiment conducted in Amsterdam additionally tested whether their subject was privy to the serial position effect. This phenomenon, which is really cool in my opinion, states that humans have the tendency to recall the first and last parts of a list (respectively known as primacy and recency effects) much better than the middle section. The subject of the replication experiment consistently had difficulty remembering the middle section of the nonsense syllable lists, but there was almost no problem in remembering the last three words. 

 

Finally, the keen eye may have noted that the data point at 1 day is slightly higher than the fitted curve. Although written off by Ebbinghaus as a discrepancy, the variation was still replicable. Why could this be? The answer may very well lie with scientists who later studied the beneficial effect of sleep on recall and found that the temporary memory boost seen within the first day or two does not happen if a person does not sleep.  

 

So if you're looking to understand how we remember, perhaps the studies on how we forget may teach or reinforce a couple of pointers: review your materials, draw links to what you already know, and perhaps the most important thing, don't cut out on your sleep. 


References:

 

https://examstudyexpert.com/ebbinghaus-forgetting-curve/

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0120644

https://qz.com/1213768/

https://www.psychestudy.com/cognitive/memory/ebbinghaus-forgetting-curve

https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1200_1237/

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