Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to describe the learning curve. He is most famous for discovering the most depressing fact in education. People usually forget 90% of what they learn in class within 30 days. Also, the majority of forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class. This has been confirmed many times since.

 


In 1885, he published his groundbreaking Über das Gedächtnis ("On Memory", later translated to English as Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology) in which he described experiments he conducted on himself to describe the processes of learning and forgetting.

Ebbinghaus made several findings that are still relevant and supported to this day including the forgetting curve, the learning curve, and the massed-spaced effect.

Arguably his most famous finding is the forgetting curve, which illustrates the decline of memory retention over time. The forgetting curve describes the exponential curve that illustrates how quickly we tend to forget the information we have learned. The sharpest decline is in the first twenty minutes, then in the first hour, and then the curve evens off after about one day.






The forgetting curve graph shows that humans tend to halve their memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they consciously review the learned material.

Ebbinghaus also described the learning curve that refers to how fast we learn information. The sharpest increase occurs after the first try, and gradually evens out. This means that less and less new information is retained after each repetition. Like the forgetting curve, the learning curve is also exponential.

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Teaching tips:

1. More pictures & less talk & text

More pictures & less talk & text: Use pictures as much as possible in your presentations and instruction

Why? Recall doubles when a picture is added as compared to when information is presented using just text. Three days after instruction, the average a person will remember 10% of the oral presented information, 35% if the material was presented only visually, and 65% if information was presented both orally and visually.

The more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized and recalled. In regards to memory, vision and text follow very different rules. This fact has a special name, namely, pictorial superiority effect or PSE.

In comparisons with other forms of communication, a picture demolishes both text and oral presentation. Adults can remember more than 2,500 pictures with at least 90% accuracy several days post-exposure; even through subjects saw each picture for about 10 seconds. Accuracy rates a year later still hovered around 63%. In one study, picture recognition was reliably retrieved several decades later.

For a more complete discussion of the role our eyes plays in education, refer to the vision section of this site.

2. Activate prior knowledge with the use of schemas.

A schema is a cognitive framework that guide memory, aide in the interpretation of events, and influence how we retrieve stored memories. The following video illustrates the usefulness of schemas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzbRpMlEHzM