I have long been interested in how long and how well students retain the knowledge and skills they gain through schooling. Recently, my friend Dexter Fletcher sent me a PDF of the following report:

Wisher, Robert A., Sabol, Mark A., and Ellis, John A. (July 1999). Staying sharp: Retention of military knowledge and skills. U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Retrieved 1/1/2011 from http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA366825.

This report is a 1999 summary of the research on military training. Remember, there is a difference between training and education. In the case of the US military, training focuses on preparing military personnel to deal effectively with a reasonably well-defined set of problems and tasks. Trainees can be assessed via hands-on tests. Field strip this rifle. Repair this instrument. Service this jet engine. Fly this helicopter. Of course, such activities are done in a context of goal-oriented, thinking-based knowledge and understanding. So, they include education components.

Most of the people reading this IAE Blog entry are education oriented. As you reading the training-oriented ideas that follow, think about how they might pertain to general schooling.

The Training Context

In schooling, we are guided by state standards. We want students to show mastery of these standards. Here is a quote about Army training. Each trainee receives both some general training and some training is a specific job task areas.

Every year the Army trains soldiers on over 40,000 tasks. The more complex tasks, such as repair of a radio communications system, may require several weeks of training per soldier. The Army assumes that the huge budget of time and money needed for this training is an investment that will pay off in later job performance. That is, soldiers will retain the knowledge and skills they acquire in training long enough to perform effectively in their career assignments.

However, people forget and skills get rusty. A century of research on memory has shown that large amounts of forgetting can occur naturally over periods as short as several hours or as long as many years

The key point is that over time people forget. What can we teachers and our students do to increase long-term retention?

Basic Questions

Here are three questions stated in terms of training. However, they also apply to general education.

1.  How fast does forgetting occur for different kinds of skills?

2.  Are some individuals more likely to forget than others?

3.  What instructional strategies are effective in reducing forgetting?

4.  How difficult will it be for soldiers to reacquire skills they have forgotten?

General Skills

The following three general skills are relevant in any time of job performance both in and outside of the military. Quoting from the document:

1.  ability to retrieve from memory previously-learned knowledge (job-related facts, rules, terminology, order of steps to be performed in a procedure, etc.);

2.  ability to combine incoming information, evaluate a situation, and decide among alternative courses of action; and

3.  ability to execute the chosen action or procedural step in a sufficiently skilled manner.

Different parts of the brain are involved in these three types of activities. One’s forgetting rates can vary over these areas depending on types and amount of training, cognitive abilities, and use after the training has occurred.

Generally speaking, the “use it or lose it” statement applies. However, rates of forgetting can be slowed by over learning, and rates of relearning are generally much faster than the original learning. As an example, the report points out that research suggests that effective relearning can be accomplished in about 35% of the original training time.

I find that the relearning statement is particularly interesting. In schooling, the original teaching/learning is often done to prepare students for something that they will encounter in the future. In many cases, "the future" is far enough away so that considerable forgetting occurs before the future arrives.  Students are faced by the challenge of learning in a manner that both produces long term retention and that facilitates fast relearning.

Two Other Interesting Ideas

1. Training is often done in a “clock hours” setting. Each trainee receives the same number of clock hours of instruction. Those who achieve master faster thus have the time and opportunity to do over learning.
2. Training for complex multi-step processes is much more long lasting if the process being learned inherently provides feedback to a person working to accomplish the procedure. Learning and retaining a ten-step procedure is quite difficult if the procedure being carried out provides no feedback on correctness of the steps accomplished until the 10^th step is done.

Think about these two ideas in terms of a student learning to do paper and pencil multidigit multiplication or division. The student carries out a long sequence off steps and finally arrives at an answer. If the student has an answer key or calculator, feedback on correctness can be obtained. Without such aids, the student completes the task without external feedback both during the process and after the process is completed. This is a very difficult learning situation.

Peer Tutoring

IAE is currently carrying out a major initiative on tutoring in math education. See http://iae-pedia.org/Math_Tutoring. Here is a quote from the military training document that I found quite interesting:

Finally, a large number of research studies have shown that peer tutoring, having students teach each other, enhances original learning. But two studies by Navy researchers also showed the effects of peer tutoring on retention. In the first study, performance for both the peer tutors and the students who received the tutoring was near 100% at the end of initial learning. Six months later, however, the peer tutors remembered significantly more than did the students they tutored. The second study examined the effects of tutoring over longer retention intervals. Tutors were found to retain more than non-tutors did for periods as long as eight years. This is apparently an example of the old saying, “To teach is to learn twice.”