The Science of Forgetting and the Art of Remembering (Part II) KAREN KAUFMAN
Editor’s Note: You can find Part I of Karen’s experience with this research-informed strategy in “Think Differently and Deeply Volume 3.”
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ave we learned this before?” is one of the most unsettling questions a teacher can hear from students at the end of what was thought to be a successful school year. It is also the first line of an article I wrote in 2017 for Volume 3 of the CTTL’s “Think Differently and Deeply” publication. This article, “The Science of Forgetting and The Art of Remembering,” described how a colleague and I implemented spaced repetition and interleaving in our Algebra 2/Trigonometry classes. If you are thinking, hold on, topics in math courses don’t lend themselves to spacing and interleaving, you are right. But this might be because you are thinking of the math classroom you are used to. Traditionally, math topics are presented linearly, each building on the prior one — envision a textbook’s table of contents that a class spends the year working through. However, I was at a point in my teaching career when I could no longer deny the dissatisfaction that students and I both felt at the end of a school year when it was time to prepare for the final exam. Student stress and lower-than-anticipated final exam grades had become an expected end of year norm. The final exam
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seemed to be a measurement of how well students crammed for the exam rather than how well they had learned throughout the year. And, our math teachers were spending the better part of each new school year revisiting prior year’s content to make up for students forgetting much of what they had learned. Since math is a subject that continues to build on prior knowledge, this was a debilitating cycle for all involved. What’s more frustrating is that we knew why the forgetting was happening. As researchinformed educators, we were familiar with Hermann Ebbinghaus’ study of memory retrieval aptly named the “forgetting curve.” The forgetting curve has the shape of a decreasing exponential-like function with the greatest decline in memory (steepest portion of the curve) occurring within the first few hours or days of learning a new topic. The antidote to forgetting was to revisit the topics at appropriatelyspaced intervals. So, after years of frustration, and armed with this compelling research, my brave colleague and I decided to try spacing and interleaving. We completely deconstructed and reorganized our Algebra 2/Trigonometry course to provide ongoing and multiple
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