"What if understanding memory was the key to unlocking learning?"
Long-term memory is a powerhouse of human cognition, helping us to solve problems, make sense of new information and look things up. But storing things securely in long-term memory can be really hard, particularly for students who have to remember lots of new information in lots of different subjects. Spaced-repetition is a solution to this problem. It is one of the best-evidenced findings in cognitive psychology, and makes remembering things much easier and quicker, but despite this it is not often used: in fact, it has been described as a ‘case study in the failure to apply the results of psychological research’. This presentation will give a quick overview of spaced-repetition research, and then focus on some practical advice about how you can integrate a spaced-repetition flashcard system into your teaching & planning.
A response to “Teaching So Students Will Never Forget”
In Daisy Christodoulou’s researchED presentation, the focus was primarily on improving retention and retrieval of ‘content that has been understood’. The situation she describes “they got it; they understood it in the lesson…but a week later they’ve forgotten it” could very well describe the ‘forgetting curve’ in action but, crucially, it could also describe shallow learning and formative assessment that has not captured whether learners have understood the content of the lesson.
Pupils will often demonstrate being able to perform a procedure or repeat factual information shortly after being shown it / told it but this does not evidence understanding. The primary research Christodoulou presents for the ‘forgetting curve’ is based on retention of nonsense syllables and demonstrates perfectly that meaningless information is hard to remember. If content is made meaningful and connects to previously understood content, pupils will be able to remember it much better, as Christodoulou explains in her talk (when she references elaborative encoding). However, the remainder of the presentation focuses only on the use of ‘active and spaced repetition’ to improve recall and it could be argued that it is far more important to ensure that the content is made meaningful in the first place, in order to promote understanding and subsequent retention.
If pupils appear to be forgetting taught content, consider these questions:
For a more nuanced view on memory from a cognitive science perspective and a useful definition of ‘understanding’, read this blog by Dr Efrat Furst (MSc. and PhD in cognitive neuroscience – specifically Human Learning and Memory – and a qualified secondary science teacher).
