Teaching Tip: Concepts and tools can increase learning
October 28, 2014
In 1885, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus noticed a remarkable thing. When people
learn factual information, recall decays over time, but when a person relearns something,
they remember it longer.
Ebbinghaus’s work was expanded on in subsequent years. In 1930, Theophilos Boreas
discovered that the rate of memory decay was logarithmic.
Other researchers found that the kind of information has an effect on our ability
to learn and remember. Material that is contextual or relevant to the learner is more
easily retained. In the 1970s, Sebastian Leitner developed a system to improve upon
the efficiency of using flashcards for learning. In Leitner’s system, well-known facts,
those which are answered correctly, come up less frequently during memorization because
the learner already knows them. Instead, the learner spends more time with facts that
are more difficult to learn. These systems are now referred to as Spaced Repetition
Systems.
Read the full Teaching Tip, which includes tools for modern-day flashcard systems,
on iTeachU.
-- Teaching Tip by Dan LaSota, UAF eLearning instructional designer