How Do We Ensure That Students Remember What We Teach Them? (Part 2 of 3)

Minimizing the Forgetting Curve and Improving Learner Retention 1

Forgetting, or more correctly minimising the rate at which we forget, is a function of several facets of learning. To maximise retention, your design should:

•  Ensure the student is engaged by the subject matter.
• Know what you want the student to remember.
• Design in-built course motivation.
• Create cohesive, linked content.
• Design to use a range of content delivery styles.
• Provide pre-course preparatory content.
• Enable discovery learning.
• Provide effective knowledge checks.
• Provide post-course performance support content.

I have split the discussion of these solutions over a couple of blogs.

Design learning that is pertinent

You need to make sure that what you teach is pertinent to your students. It sounds obvious, but have you ever been asked to design or write a five-day training course with three or four modules per day? I have, and that means that I am developing a training event on a topic that is defined by the length of time that the customer wants students to be studying. 

As elearning and mlearning begin to dominate the learning landscape, we find that our learning design is more focused on providing the right information, at the right level, at the right time, rather than the amount to fill an arbitrary duration. 

You should develop a course syllabus (let’s call it a course, though I am well aware of the argument that there are no courses any more, just  topics that can be linked together as required) based on the information that you need the students to study. This may mean that a course may be shorter (or longer) than the prescribed length, but it only contains information that is relevant to students. Of course, not all content is relevant to all students, but this exercise should weed out the content that, with the best will in the world, is relevant to no one.

 

Ensure you know what you want students to remember

Even when we provide training that is pertinent, it is important that we know what we want students to remember. Knowledge workers today are far more comfortable with finding out information, rather than holding it all in their heads (as you can see in this interesting article http://clomedia.com/articles/view/the_new_knowledge_worker_enabling_the_next_generation/print:1) so it is important to identify those elements (if any) that you want them to remember. 

If you are concerned with students retaining information, rather than just knowing that information exists and having a good idea how to find it, you need to identify which information you want them to remember. Do this in discussion with the training stakeholders, but be prepared to challenge them if they say that everything in the course is important and needs to be remembered. If you can gather the core elements that students absolutely need to remember there is a good chance that your design can ensure an acceptable retention rate.

You should note that you may need to provide evidence of this success. This will require some level of post-course assessment. I am not going to cover examinations or tests of this sort here, as they are a function of testing memory, rather than encouraging information retention.

 

Provide motivation within the training

Reward is one of the oldest motivational stimulus. In the classroom it may be something as simple as praise. We are all motivated by “winning”, as discussed by Jere Brophy in Motivating Students to Learn (Brophy, 2010). You need to understand what winning means for your students, so that you can identify motivational options. The best way to find this out is to ask a sample of the target audience.

Rewards must be linked to the information covered from your training. This may be deductive, where you pose a scenario or ask a question where the student must extrapolate information to deduce a solution, or retentive, where you ask the student to answer a question on the subject matter previously covered. If possible, you should use a variety of approaches. The reward itself can be anything from a simple “well done” to providing additional content or options; a technique widely used in games-based learning.

Behaviourist educational psychologists broadly emphasise motivation based on positive reinforcement from the “teacher” (an external motivation) while constructivists encourage the development of learning content that triggers an internal motivation, where the student congratulates themselves on a job well done. This is a rather basic description, but for us in the practical world, the type of motivation is not as important as the fact that we motivate our students.

 

Design in-course links

One of the key methods of remembering is by turning single pieces of data into a related map of information. For example, remembering the steps in a process is easier if the student has a context for the process. If you explain a process in the framework of a scenario, the student is more likely to remember the steps. A good scenario, especially one that runs throughout a training event, makes it possible for students to trigger recall of individual details by remembering the overall story. This is the basic philosophy of memory maps, as discussed in Tony Buzan’s Use Both Sides of Your Brain (Buzan, 1976). These links also provide the opportunity to revise previously learned information, without obviously going over it again. For self-study, such as elearning and mlearning, any lack of subtlety in revision can cause the student to lose interest and move to the next topic.

 

Design for Multi-modal, Multi-layered Content

The Learning Pyramid premise may not be completely true, but it has elements that are well worth noting. Passive study is generally not as effective as active learning, with regards to memory. This means that the top four sections (lecture, read, listen and watch demonstration) are less effective than bottom three sections (group discussion, practice, teaching others). However, it doesn’t take much analysis to realise that without the top four any group discussion, practice or teaching will be short lived. The use of multi-layered learning, with the students learning from a subject authority then putting what they have learnt into some sort of practice, offers the information reinforcement to build stronger memories. 

In addition to this, a mix of content styles, when used to reinforce common information, will deliver greater knowledge retention. This being the case, you should design content that offers as wide a range of delivery styles as possible. In classroom scenarios this is done by the instructor or teacher, who varies their delivery by using lecture, visual aids, demonstrations and discussion to explain and explore a topic. They will also encourage collaborative learning, where the students work together, teaching and learning from each other, to enhance the learning process.

In digital learning (elearning, mlearning, and so forth) the designer must incorporate a rich variety of content delivery styles to emulate what the teacher does in the classroom. This can service the preferred learning styles of students and engage students by offering content in different and challenging formats. This may be a video, a hands-on simulation, or even games. The use of social media for collaborative or group learning should also be a standard for all digital learning designers.

You can find out more in my next blog, How Do We Ensure That Students Remember What We Teach Them? (Part 3 of 3).