Spaced repetition
We’ve talked a lot about evaluation in our recent publications. We’ve also talked a lot about learning, and if you don’t mind me borrowing Montaigne’s way of “leaping and bounding”, I’d like to come back to the question of learning. How do we learn? And above all, in the context of assessment, how do we memorise?
You’ll remember that we showed that assessments were a way of improving learning, not just measuring it. We also saw that multiple readings of a course could lead not to knowledge, but to the illusion of knowledge. And in fact, to work on memorising knowledge in the long term you need to know a few things, including this one which I think is fundamental.
In fact, before I learned of its existence, I always felt a little guilty: how is it that I have absolutely no memory of this book, even though I spent several weeks reading it? How come I don’t even remember seeing this film? Is it possible that I didn’t learn anything from the physics curriculum at school?
In fact, the answer is there: it’s the forgetting curve.
What is it all about? The amount of information retained diminishes by half after each day. In short, the more time passes, the less we remember. Our hard-won knowledge sinks into the limbo of our brains if we don’t revive it. Neuroscience teaches us that, to counteract forgetting, we need to practise spaced repetition. What does this mean? Justin Reich sums it up in his book Failure to disrupt:
“people remember things better when they practice recalling them over a long period of time rather than through cramming. If you have a choice between studying for an hour one day before a test or studying for twenty minutes each of the three days before a test, the spaced practice is almost universally better.”
Here’s the secret. Avoid learning at the last moment and, above all, concentrating on learning over a short period of time. What pays off is repetition.
