What if everything you knew about education was wrong? by David Didau

Author:David Didau [Didau, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845909802
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
Published: 2015-06-15T22:00:00+00:00

Of all the ‘desirable difficulties’, the spacing effect is perhaps the most straightforward and easiest to accept. The benefits on long-term retention have been demonstrated for all manner of materials and tasks, types of learners and time scales. In fact, Hermann Ebbinghaus was banging on about his ‘forgetting curve’ well over a century ago, and the spacing effect he discovered is one of the most widely accepted effects unearthed by experimental research on learning and memory.* Ebbinghaus discovered that he could learn a list of 12 nonsense syllables by restudying it 68 times but, by spacing repetitions over three days, he could get that down to 38 repetitions – almost half the amount of study time for the same result. The conclusions seem clear: our memories are strengthened if we wait for a while before restudying rather than repeating the exercise straightaway.

In our efforts to cover the curriculum, we jump from topic to topic, ensuring pupils are familiar with each topic and then moving on. Typically, though, we will forget a good deal of the information we encounter within a few days of learning it. As we saw in Chapter 9, forgetting is the route to better learning. It might, with sufficient planning, be possible to expect students to remember far more of what we want them to learn.

Ebbinghaus also conducted experiments into how information could be retained for as long as possible. He found that if we allow some forgetting to take place before reviewing the material to be learned, the curve of forgetting starts to flatten off (see Figure 12.1).

Figure 12.1. The spacing effect

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