Unit 1 Fighting Forgetting
The first unit, “Fighting Forgetting”, focuses on one of the greatest enemies but an essential element of learning. Ryan and Frankland (2022) highlight that forgetting is “in itself a loaded concept” (p. 183). On the one hand, forgetting is the natural decay of memory over time, best summarised by Ebbinghaus’s “Forgetting Curve”. Ebbinghaus’s work still shows that memory that is not connected, memorable, relevant or retrieved will naturally decay over time, with the most significant decline occurring soon after learning. While our brains will naturally forget what we learn when these conditions are not met, forgetting is often thought of as a purely negative construct. However unintuitive it may seem, research suggests that forgetting plays a positive role in learning: It can increase long-term retention, information retrieval and performance.
When these conditions (i.e. connected, memorable, relevant or retrieved) are not met, ironically, they underlie those actions that boost our memory. Here, the learner’s actions can combat the passive decline of memory that undermines our ability to develop schemas essential to building understanding. Furthermore, these actions can harness certain aspects of the forgetting process (i.e. contextual cues) that strengthen the connections, durability, and speed we retrieve from our long-term memory, which underlies our ability to think and solve problems.
Fighting Forgetting focuses on the toolkit strategies of Strategy #2 Retrieve It (retrieval practice), Strategy #4 Jumble It (interleaving) and Strategy #3 Space it (spaced practice). These high-utility strategies can improve student retention and knowledge recall by circumventing the passive decay of memory and thought. When used together, these strategies evoke a learning equation that brings to bear those active and essential ingredients (i.e. consolidation, effort, feedback and the inhibitory mechanism that overcomes interference) that strengthen the accuracy, automaticity and depth of understanding and thought.
Fighting Forgetting trains students to use efficient, high-impact and transferable strategies that students can use in Languages, Mathematics and Science. The main strategies that constitute Fighting Forgetting are:
- Quick Review
- Brain Dumps
- Flash Cards
