I inadvertently came across this article while searching for another and found it interesting. While the author focuses on training in the corporate world I believe its relevance extends into other training arenas as well.

I would strongly recommend watching the 90 second video linked in the article titled Selective Attention Test by the Invisible Gorilla folks.

[note: I've included the article hyperlinks and chart in this post, but article comments can be found at the linked article.]

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Brain Science: The Forgetting Curve–the Dirty Secret of Corporate Training

Art Kohn
March 13, 2014

Imagine you’re put in charge of your company’s biggest leadership training program. You do everything right: you conduct extensive discovery with your subject-matter experts, you spend weeks authoring the storyboard, your executive team signs off, and you deliver a stellar training experience. Everything goes beautifully and everyone agrees the training was a huge success. Your work is done.

But back in your office, while you bask in the glory of your success, a dreadful thing is happening inside the brains of your students. The neural networks that your training inspired are beginning to dissolve, and as a result, your employees are quietly forgetting almost everything you presented.

How bad is the problem? How much do people forget? Research on the forgetting curve (Figure 1) shows that within one hour, people will have forgotten an average of 50 percent of the information you presented. Within 24 hours, they have forgotten an average of 70 percent of new information, and within a week, forgetting claims an average of 90 percent of it. Some people remember more or less, but in general, the situation is appalling, and it is the dirty secret of corporate training: no matter how much you invest into training and development, nearly everything you teach to your employees will be forgotten. Indeed, although corporations spend 60 billion dollars a year on training, this investment is like pumping gas into a car that has a hole in the tank. All of your hard work simply drains away.



Figure 1: The forgetting curve

And it gets worse. Given that our employees forget most of what they learn, we should have no hope that our training will transfer back to the workplace. After all, memory is a necessary condition for behavior change, and if your employees have forgotten the lessons of your leadership seminar, there is no reason to expect them to become more effective leaders back in the workplace.

Why do people forget so much?

As a learning professional, it is essential that you understand why we forget, and so I will address the issue this month. Next month, I begin discussing ways to overcome the forgetting curve.

Everyone is always bragging about the power of the human brain. So if it is so darned powerful, why does it fail so often? Why do we forget 90 percent of what we learn within one week? From the perspective of a neuroscientist, this question speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding about the brain and about forgetting. Whereas most people think of forgetting as a failure of memory, “I forgot because my memory failed,” in professional neuroscience, forgetting is not thought of as a failure at all. Instead forgetting is thought of as a natural, adaptive, and even desirable activity.

Let me explain. At this moment, thousands of sensory inputs are inundating your brain and your brain is busy ... ignoring them. For example, sensory impulses are racing from your left ankle telling your brain about its position in space. However you were not aware of this sensory information until I brought it to your attention because your brain was actively suppressing that input. Simultaneously, other inputs are arriving and your brain is ignoring them too. For example, your brain is ignoring the background noise in the room, the feel of clothing against your shoulder, and perhaps a faint odor of coffee in the room.

You get the idea ... at every moment sensory information is flooding your brain, and your brain actively suppresses most of it using center-surround neural networks (see the end of the article for more information). This suppression is highly adaptive because, by suppressing most information, you are now free to focus on what you think are the one or two more essential pieces of information.

You need to experience this for yourself. Please watch this 90 second youtube video and discover how our selective attention makes us oblivious to most information in the environment.

Avoiding memory overload

If our brain suppresses active sensory inputs, it also needs to suppress active memories so that it can focus only on essential information. When you think about it, every minute of the day we receive a river of information that is relevant only for a short period of time. For example, you may have remembered the phone number of a restaurant for a couple of minutes, but then it was no longer useful, and your brain managed to quickly forget it. Likewise, you parked your car last Thursday and you remembered where it was for the rest of the day, but now that the information is no longer useful, your brain has forgotten it.

The point here is that your brain needs to forget things that are no longer useful. And this forgetting is inevitable, it is useful, and it is adaptive because it clears your memory for things that are more relevant. The problem, however, is that in the process of all of this memory purging, our brain often forgets important information.

Is there any hope?

Your leadership training did indeed go well and you deserve credit for it. But when you go back to your office, you can’t afford to bask in your success because, although the training went well, the ideas are quickly and quietly leaking out of the gas tank. But here is good news and there is hope.

Although the brain will inevitably purge most of what it learns, it does retain some information, and contemporary neuroscience has discovered the signals that teach your brain which signals to remember and which information to purge and which information to retain. Next month, we will teach you ways to talk to the brain, and tell it to retain the important information.

Digging deeper

If you want to dig deeper, here are some great resources:

This two-minute YouTube video provides a great introduction to neural networks

Learn about Center-Surround neural networks (advanced)

Explore selective attention and the invisible gorilla

Edited: to correct the video title

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Modern Day Savage,

This is the follow-up article in the series.


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Brain Science: Overcoming the Forgetting Curve

Art Kohn
April 10, 2014

In last month’s column we admitted the painful fact that our employees quickly forget most of what they learn. And while forgetting depends on many factors, research shows that, on average, students forget 70 percent of what we teach within 24 hours of the training experience (Figure 1). This is a “dirty secret of training” because while we all know it is true, training organizations spend 60 billion dollars a year on training programs knowing full well that most of that knowledge will quickly disappear.

And we wonder why we do not get a lot of respect.



Figure 1: The forgetting curve, training’s dirty secret

Forgetting is usually an active, adaptive, and even desirable process. After all, most of the things we remember (like where we set our glasses), are only of short-term importance, and after a day or so the brain needs to suppress such time-limited memories in order to free space for information that may be of more immediate value.

The problem is that if you remember, say, 50 things in a day, your brain does not automatically know which of these bits of information will be useful to you in the long run. As a result it sometimes purges the baby right along with the bathwater.

Coping with the forgetting curve

The good news is that while forgetting is a pervasive process, it is not random. In fact, it is possible to signal the brain that a particular piece of information is important and that it should retain it. Professor Henry Roediger and his laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis are doing the pioneering work in this area. Henry is a prolific researcher, one of my personal heroes, and his research provides us with strategies for signaling the brain to retain particular pieces of information.

In brief, Dr. Roediger’s research shows that when you force a learner to recall information in the hours and days after training, then they are much, much more likely to retain that information in the long run. Let’s look at a couple of experiments that illustrate this point.

In the first, study, students studied a series of pictures and were told to remember as many of them as possible. Afterward, they let one group leave the lab while they gave a second group a brief booster quiz during which they simply wrote down as many pictures as they could recall; they gave a third group three successive opportunities to recall the pictures. Note that they did not give these latter two groups any additional study time—they simply asked them to recall the photos. One week later, all of the students returned to the lab for a comprehensive recall test. As you can see in Figure 2, the opportunity to recall the pictures immediately after the training significantly increased the chances that they remembered the information a week later.




Figure 2: The opportunity to recall pictures immediately after training significantly increased the chances that they remembered the information a week later

A clever researcher might criticize this experiment by pointing out that the students who took the practice tests had, in effect, more study time and this caused them to recall more pictures. To address this concern, Dr. Roediger conducted another experiment where a group of students read essays on science topics. Afterward, half of the students had a chance to reread the text and half of the students spent about the same amount of time answering a series of booster questions that asked them to recall material from the passages.

Several days later, the researchers gave all of the students an exam over the materials. The results showed that those students who read the material and took a booster quiz did significantly better than those students who read and then reread the material. This was true when they conducted the exam two days after studying and even truer when they did the exam one week after studying (see Figure 3).



Figure 3: More evidence that when you force a learner to recall information in the hours and days after training they are far more likely to retain that information in the long run

These two experiments, along with perhaps two hundred more dating back to 1909, clearly demonstrate that opportunities to recall information in the days and weeks after training dramatically improve the long-term retention of material.

Use it or lose it

Why do booster opportunities cause the brain to retain information? One explanation, based on the idea mentioned above, is that your brain wants to retain information that is useful to you and purge information that is not. And so, if you happen to call that information into your mind in the hours and days after training, your brain tags that information as important and is more likely to retain it. If you use it, you won’t lose it!

So what do these results mean for corporate and industrial training? In short, if you provide your learners with booster events in the hours and days after training you can reshape their forgetting curve. For example, if you provide employees with a leadership seminar on Monday, you can expect that most of this information will be lost within a week. However, if you provide a booster event, such as a multiple-choice questionnaire, it causes the learner to recall the information, which will reset the learner’s forgetting curve (see Figure 4). Furthermore, strategically providing a series of these booster events will reset the forgetting curve each time and will maximize long-term retrieval (Figure 5).




Figure 4: A booster event “re-sets” a learner’s forgetting curve




Figure 5: A series of booster events maximizes long-term retrieval

An important note here is that these booster events improve retention for the entire learning experience, and not just for the particular topics in the quiz question. This “halo effect” means that just a few booster experiences can enhance the retention of the entire training session.


A strategy for moving forward

Booster training provides an amazing opportunity to enhance the ROI of our training programs. Let’s take our heads out of the sand and not allow the forgetting curve to flush away 70 percent of our training. We can do better.

So here is a mantra to yell over the top of your cubicle. If your goal is to produce long-term retention, and if your goal is to produce behavior change, then what you do after training is more important than what you do during training. If you do nothing, people will forget most of your training. However, if you provide them with a series of booster experiences, you will signal the learner’s brain that that particular information is important and, in turn, they will be far more likely to remember it.

The details of boostering matter a lot, and next month we will look at the optimal ways to author and deliver them. See you then.

Digging deeper

Dr. Henry Roediger is one of the masters of memory research, and if you have a serious interest in this discipline, here are some more resources to explore:

This is the website for Dr. Roediger’s laboratory at the Washington University in St. Louis.

These two articles, “Benefits of Testing Memory. Best Practices and Boundary Conditions,” and “The Power of Testing Memory” provide the research foundation that will help you understand the forgetting curve and how you can cope with it.

[note: the hyperlinks in the above 2 references are broken at the source, probably either moved or deleted]

Finally, by the time you read this article, Dr. Roediger will have released his new book entitled Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. It is awesome.

There are several additional articles in this series by the same author, for those interested in learning more.

Doesn't take me nearly as long as those charts to forget anything, these days.

Bob

good stuff

quality training + repitition and reinforcement are the keys

there things that i 'well-learned' years / decades ago that I will NEVER forget.

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The first part of learning is active listening, which too few individuals do these days.

The second part in the way is Human Resources, who can't hire worth a damn and constantly try to diversify by bringing in people who don't understand the material to begin with.

I guarantee you, correct both of those and the slope that generates the percentages the article references will drastically change. Otherwise, I appreciate the post and will keep in mind the information.

Good point Dakor. Those being trained need to be both able and motivated to learn the training. I believe it also requires exceptional trainers who not only know the material being taught, but also find ways to relate it so that trainees understand why it is important to learn. Motivated trainees and trainers go a long ways to accomplishing this.

While quality training followed by reinforcement is certainly one of the keys to ingraining new material, what I found interesting in these articles is just how quickly it was forgotten by trainees, and also how quickly after the initial training the reinforcement trainings needed to be implemented in order to slow the Forgetting Curve and better help their brains tag the information as important enough not to purge it as 'no longer important or needed'.

No comments on the video?

Roediger is perhaps most widely known for his research in the area of false memory, looking at why and how people develop memories of events that never happened to them.

This is critically important research for those that remember the daycare child abuse cases, criminal cases etc.

quote:

Originally posted by Modern Day Savage:
No comments on the video?

My dispatch center boss had me watch it many years ago. I was surprised what I learned from it and was so impressed that I still recall it clearly. I will say no more except to recommend it.

There is a reason that schools only teach a subject for an hour at a time. People can't focus on the same thing for much longer. There is also a reason they assign homework problems and papers, and have quizzes and tests - to reinforce the material. Even then the retention isn't stellar, but it's better.

Corporate training often takes an entire day, or multiple entire days in sequence. And it is usually just lecture and classroom exercises, no self-application of the material and no tests. And most often it has no practical relevance to most people's actual jobs. Is it any wonder that it is quickly forgotten?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Lefty Sig,

This is an interesting post. I am learning Spanish as a hobby.

When you learn a language, acquiring new vocabulary is crucial but challenging. If you go the route of flashcards and lists it gets boring quickly.

I like to learn new vocabulary in a context, it helps me remember the words better.

But there is no substitute for repetition. Language learning is a process of learning, then forgetting and then relearning.

It helps to be conscious of this cycle, and you can try to improve your retention with memory tricks, but I think at the end of the day you have to have repetition.

Right this moment (Sunday evening 7 pm) I'm supposed to be learning a couple of moderately difficult choral sections in a mass by Frank Martin. I was about to look for advice on how to learn (not necessarily memorize) a musical piece.
My little side trip to SigForum turned up this, which may in the long run be very helpful, but rehearsal is tomorrow.