Move Past the Forgetting Curve

Don't let the forgetting curve limit your training goals.

What matters is how much information learners retain — their Retention Curve — not how much they forget.

Who was one of the first to chart the course of forgetting over time?

The Forgetting Curve is based on an experiment that Dr. Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, conducted in the 1880s. He memorized some nonsense words and tested his own recall of the information. He studied how much he forgot over time and found that his ability to recall specific syllables dropped sharply right away. The content that he was able to remember after an initial period of hours or days faded more slowly over time. Ebbinghaus examined what happened when he studied information more than once to figure out how repetition affected his ability to recall information later.

His work on the effect of time and repetition on a person’s ability to recall information has become known as the “Forgetting Curve.” It essentially shows that, over time, and without sufficient repetition or refreshing, recalling information becomes harder.

While this is true, the notion of the Forgetting Curve is often misapplied or misunderstood. Those tidy charts — the ones that show that learners forget a specific percentage of what they’ve learned in 24 hours, 48 hours, a week — oversimplify the challenge of knowledge retention and leave out essential information.

Even worse, they focus on the wrong thing: What matters isn't what learners forget but how to ensure they remember, retain, and can recall information in the appropriate context.

Make Room for the Retention Curve

Ensuring that learners retain what they’ve learned and can use it to improve their performance on the job suggests that focusing on a Retention Curve is more useful than worrying about learners’ Forgetting Curve.

Key principles of learning science, cited by Halpern and Hakel, apply here:

“Practice at Retrieval”

Asking learners to respond to cues, repeatedly, over time, in a variety of contexts, is the “single most important variable in promoting long-term knowledge retention and transfer.” This cognitive principle is known as spaced repetition.

Spaced Practice

Asking learners to recall and apply information repeatedly and occasionally, again, over time, through spaced repetition of the material, moves information into long-term memory and solidifies knowledge; massed practice, or cramming, aids in short-term recall but not true learning.

Prior Knowledge is a Key Influence

“What and how much is learned in any situation depends heavily on prior knowledge and experience,” according to Halpern and Hakel. “Each learner creates new meaning using what he or she already knows.”

Less is More

Asking learners to recall some information leads to selective forgetting of material not used. The key information is moved into long-term memory, while less-useful information is filtered out.

These principles suggest that, to achieve long-term learning and retention, frequent, short learning and practice sessions will do a better job than massed practice. If that practice considers each learner’s prior knowledge and build on it, while also personalizing content to the learner’s goals, ensuring that material is relevant and likely to be applied on the job, so much the better. In fact, these sound like the building blocks of a successful Retention Curve.

Agile Microlearning Creates a Knowledge Retention Curve

OttoLearn, our Agile Microlearning platform, applies evidence-based principles of learning to measure each learner’s proficiency and the speed and quality of their learning. Using proprietary algorithms, Otto:

• Figures out what the learner knows already
• Factors in the learner’s mastery goals — what they need to know
• Measures the learner’s speed and confidence level
• Calculates how quickly a learner is likely to “forget” or have a reduction in knowledge retention

Personalized Learning Paths

OttoLearn uses all of this information to target content to each learner, creating a personalized learning path:

• Learners engage in short (2-minute) Mastery Moments once or a few times each day.
• Otto delivers Activities just frequently enough that learners retain knowledge and improve their mastery.
• Rather than deliver the same content to all learners, OttoLearn delivers targets content, adapting to each learner’s goals, prior expertise — and progress.
• Activities test knowledge from a variety of angles and contexts, to ensure that learners exercise and their knowledge in an active and engaging way, eschewing passive learning based on rote memorization.

Unique Knowledge Retention Curves

Because each learner’s needs and prior knowledge are unique, each learner’s Knowledge Retention Curve is unique. And OttoLearn is flexible enough to bend the Retention Curve to individuals’ changing circumstances.

• When Janet in sales goes on a three-week vacation, Otto will deliver Activities designed to refresh her recall of essential information when she returns
• If Hakim moves from product sales to a new position as warehouse fulfillment manager, he’ll need to apply his extensive knowledge of products to anticipating and meeting demand. Otto will deliver fewer Activities related to product features and more Activities related to his new role.

Forget the Forgetting Curve. Power learning and transfer by creating a Knowledge Retention Curve. Talk to an OttoLearn microlearning expert today!