Retention of Information Learned

A large focus of staff and students days is around retention of learning to ensure students capitalise on the hard work that goes into learning each day. A key challenge in education is ensuring that learning is retained and stored in long term memory, so that it can be recalled and applied when it is required. 

The actual process in which learning takes place is that; we are attentive to what is being presented and engage in that process. That new skill is then processed in the working memory space in our brain. This area of the brain is quite limited and can only store a finite amount of information. So in order to 'learn' and remember that content, students must see it and engage with it multiple times to store it in the long term memory part of our brain, which is unlimited in its capacity. There is no set number of times that we must see and engage with new content in order to remember it, but obviously, the more times one engages with it, the more effective. 

Learning new content and training ourselves to remember it is only half of the battle. In order for learning to be retained when it is stored in the long term memory, we must constantly be retrieving that information in different contexts to ensure learning is not forgotten. As you can see below in the 'Forgetting Curve' graph, when content is constantly reviewed after it has been learned, students are more likely to be able to retain this new information.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how great an educational idea or intervention is in principle; what really matters is how it manifests itself in the day-to-day work of people in schools.