Let’s start with a test:

1. What is something you read in the last 24 hours? Anything at all. A book, an article, a poem. Now, try to remember it in as much detail as possible.
2. Next, think about something you read last week. What do you remember of that?
3. Lastly, think about something you read last month. What do you remember of that? Can you even remember what you read last month?

So, how did you do? The odds are that if you are like most people you can likely remember the thing from the last 24 hours pretty well, a few scattered bits of the piece from last week, and almost nothing or even nothing from the piece from last month (if you can even remember what you read last month).

The reason I can predict these results with relative certainty is thanks to a psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus who did a series of experiments focused on forgetting in 1885. The result of the experiments was something he called the forgetting curve, which looks like this:

In this curve, we see just how ruthless our brains are when it comes to clearing the memory storehouses of information that doesn’t deem as important anymore. The exact specifics of the curve depend on the person and content, but there are some attributes of it that are agreed upon as being nearly universal:

• We start forgetting something as soon as we learn it.
• The slope of forgetting is the most intense in the first 24 hours after we’ve learned something.
• After a week, most people remember only a small fraction of something; within a month it is not uncommon to remember no specifics at all.   

The Forgetting Curve explains why the details of that book you devoured at the beach last summer have all but vanished and why our students often suffer from amnesia when it comes to remembering our classes. And yet, it doesn’t tell the whole story because we can still remember dozens of quotes from The Outsiders verbatim even a decade after teaching it, and our students, while sometimes forgetful, can often remember an incredible amount.

So why is it that sometimes humans forget nearly everything and other times they can engage in extraordinary feats of mental recall magic? According to the Forgetting Curve, there is a pretty simple explanation: thoughtful repetition.

The hundreds of studies that have confirmed the Forgetting Curve since its discovery in 1885, have also confirmed that when we revisit or retrieve that information in thoughtful ways, our memories go from Hyde to Jekyll as the repetition strengthens those connections between neurons where those memories are stored.

Here is what the Forgetting Curve looks like when we encounter the information multiple times:

Any revisiting of a thought, memory, or concept generally strengthens the neural connections, increasing retention, though it works best when we do two things:

1. Space out the revisiting over different days (aka no cramming).
2. Weave the information together with other related ideas/skills (this is called interleaving) when we revisit it.

As teachers, we may not all know the name Ebbinghaus, but we all know the curve well. This is why we recap previous lessons, have students summarize notes at the end of a lecture, and just generally circle back to key ideas over and over. But as writing teachers, we far too often forget it exists. We mark something in a paper or say something in a conference once, and assume it will stick, when, according to Ebbinghaus it probably will be gone before the sun sets.

In my classes, I’ve been working to fix this. My rule is simple:

If something matters, we revisit it three or four times at a minimum.

This means that…

• When I give students feedback on essays, they revisit it when we conference, when they draft, and when we set goals for the next essay.
• After students set learning goals, they revisit those goals in peer review, self-review, and in the conferences with me.
• When I teach craft moves, we loop back to them again and again in a systematic way over the semester.

Even with this, there is still plenty of forgetting. We are working with young writers after all. But there is also a lot more of remembering the things that matter, and I’ve found the revisiting has also been very useful in helping students create more coherent narratives of how they are developing as writers.

So the next time you pass along important information to your students, make sure the one thing you don’t forget is Ebbinghaus and his curve!

Yours in Teaching,

Matt

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