E-180 / Where social entrepreneurship, education and social media meet

“Tell me and I forget. Teach and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” According to Piotr Wozniak, this saying should end with “Use repetition and spacing so that I become a genius”.

Just came across this fantastic article from Wired called Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to this Algorithm. It relates the story of Piotr Wozniak who created SuperMemo, a software that allows people to be remembered to remember what they want to remember (please set your UI expectations pretty low). Indeed, Wozniak thorough research on his own retention mechanisms led him to one simple conclusion (well, a part for dozens of articles on how to become a genius):

[There] is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget.

Other research was conducted a century prior to Wozniak’s discovery by German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus. He also concluded that an optimal spacing of the reactivation of knowledge was key to retention.

The most fascinating part of the article (not including Wozniak’s personality) is actually the lack of impact cognitive psychology’s discoveries have on the way we teach and perceive the learning process.

However, this technique never caught on. The spacing effect is “one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning,” the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988, at the beginning of a typically sad encomium published in American Psychologist under the title “The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research.” The sorrrowful tone is not hard to understand. How would computer scientists feel if people continued to use slide rules for engineering calculations? What if, centuries after the invention of spectacles, people still dealt with nearsightedness by holding things closer to their eyes? Psychologists who studied the spacing effect thought they possessed a solution to a problem that had frustrated humankind since before written language: how to remember what’s been learned. But instead, the spacing effect became a reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology.

The “flashcard” aspect of the theory is not what’s the most groundbreaking, obviously. Wozniak spent the first moments of his experiment writing and trying to memorize flashcards, until he didn’t have time to actually learn anything new… Not the good approach, he concluded. What’s impressive about it is the algorithm created by Wozniak to calculate when is the optimal moment for recall: when are you juuust about to forget something? That’s where you need a little boost. And not the one suggested in this other Wired article…