I remember reading research that once participants left a training course, if they did not practice what they learned right away, that learning was extinguished quickly. My memory says that up to 50% of the learning was gone after two weeks without application back on the job. Can anyone help me locate this research?

Hi and welcome to the board!

I did some searching on this and found a few interesting points:
- all the studies I found tested the subjects on random activities. Thus, the participants had no stake in the outcome. Because of this I'd expect retention to be shorter lived.
- the studies used mostly tasks. Are you talking about tasks, understanding, or some other type of training?
- the studies I read also talked about different amounts of reinforcement during the training, so for instance, something reinforced a few times during a session might have a shorter retention period than those reinforced more often.

I did not find anything comparing different methods of presentation, reinforcement, practice and so forth.

If it is indeed 50% in two weeks, it is no wonder so many students have difficulties on comprehensive final exams in their classes...

Hi fdomurad:

The studies conducted by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the nineteenth century on retention have stood the test of time and are still valid. He was both the subject and the experimenter in his now classic studies on retention -learning, relearning and measuring his own ability to retain thousands of nonsense syllables. The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve derives from the simple truism that the recent events have momentary advantage over the past events. But this advantage will dissipate rapidly, allowing the relative influence of the older learnings to recover spontaneously. The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve(used by Miller and Campbell to predict primacy and recency effects in persuasion) is a negatively accelerated curve. We could sum it up by saying that of two associations equally strong at the moment, the older one will decay more rapidly.

You can find an abundance of information by doing a search on the "forgetting curve" or Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Good luck!

Cj

Cj,
Ebbinghaus' is clearly a classic, but as I mentioned, he deals with content that has no meaning to the participants: nonsense syllables.

It seems to me that if one had to remember life or death information, there might be more incentive to remember it. That incentive might even extend to information with a large monetary value to the learner.

I have looked for and not found any studies comparing retention of data with no meaning to the subjects to data with significant meaning to the subjects. At the very least I'd expect the curve to be somewhat distorted.

Thoughts?

Hi John:

My first thought is that there are no simple solutions to complex problems. Humans being complex and forgetting being the problem.

In regard to life and death situations, David Sousa (1) refers to these as “flashbulb memories”. This is when a powerful emotional experience can cause an instantaneous and long-lasting memory of an event.

The next related information is in regard to when information is presented in a learning episode (the primacy-recency effect). Buzan (2) based his work on 40 minute learning episode. So when, information is presented during learning event affects retention.

On the chance of opening a version of Pandora’s Box, A related study about retention and teaching methods (3) indicate the learning method affects retention. This is based on using various methods and testing after 24 hrs. (24 hrs was the definition of success of learning into long term memory). No information after that period on learning decay.

So Ebbinghaus, work doesn’t apply to all learning situations. Although his basic principles hold true:
1) The more material there is to learn the longer it takes
2) The longer it has been since something has been learned the harder it is to remember (excluding periodic rehearsal)
3) Forgetting proceeds rapidly at first and them more slowly.

Whether or not a learner will forget 50% or 60% after two weeks is splitting hairs. What we can glean from these basic rules are tools about how to design training so we can influence the chance our learners will retain what we want them to.

Best regards,
Cj

(1)Sousa, David A. (2006). How the Brain Learns. Third Edition. Thousand Oaks, California. Corwin Press.
(2)Buzan, T (1989). Use both sides of your brain (3rd ed). New York: Penguin.
(3)National Training Laboratories of Bethel, Mane (now the NTL Institue of Alexandria, Virginia)