Helping Students Remember

What you do after learning something new is much more important than what you do while learning it, according to Dr. Art Kohn, former faculty at Portland State University School of Business, and now president of AK Learning. In his article, Brain Science: Overcoming the Forgetting Curve in Learning Solutions Magazine, Dr. Kohn shares methods to overcome Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve. The Forgetting Curve shows the quick and sharp decline of how humans forget information. Active and purposeful recall proves crucial for information retention over time.

Dr. Kohn suggests that forgetting is an adaptive process that is essential for human existence, especially in our current world of information overload. Our brains dispose of information that we don’t use. Therefore, using information is the most effective method for remembering it. In a fascinating way, Dr. Kohn’s research with students at Portland State shows that we don’t even need to use all of the information to remember the majority of it. We can test ourselves on just a handful of random facts and the retrieving of those facts ignites the retention of the information around them. Think of this like shining a flashlight on something–you can see that thing, but you can also see many things around it as well. His research showed that highlighting just three major subtopics from a one hour lecture increases retention of all the material from the lecture.

Kohn calls these highlighted topics “boosters” and he believes they reset the forgetting curve. Boosters are questions that trigger the recall of information. He advocates providing these boosts to learners through a “2-2-2” method–2 days, 2 weeks, and 2 months. It turns out that recalling information for five seconds, thirty seconds, and five minutes all result in nearly the same amount of benefit in terms of longer term retention of material. The type of boost (multiple choice question, fill-in-the-blank question, application question) makes no difference, provided the boost requires effortful information processing in order to respond.

Why not try a test of your own? In one class use 2-2-2 “boosts” and compare it to another class. Possibly set up a group chat for the class with a tool like GroupMe or Telegram and send out a question two hours after the lecture and make it a game to respond. Those who respond correctly get something. Remember our last post on play? If you try this 2-2-2 boosting idea, please come back and share what you noticed by leaving a comment below!

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn."

–Benjamin Franklin