Endless Learning Through Spaced Repetition
By: Burcu Cetin
Tags: Technology, Education, Learning, Spaced Repetition, Microlearning

As the Mindhood family, our goal is to become the micro-learning platform for 21st-century global citizens and future change-makers. We want a community of knowledgeable people willing to take simple, daily actions to create change. But in order to act with purpose, we need to be more aware and more educated. To this end, we have been searching for ways to facilitate learning, improve recall, and enhance memory. So, we continued to test the time-honored and the new ways to commit things into memory to determine what works best.

We found that while most strategies give you some improvement in memory and recall, they are just not powerful enough. One strategy, however, stood out from the rest, and we realized it was one of the oldest strategies for memorizing. Having stood the test of time, Spaced Repetition drastically changed the way we retained knowledge. As a team, we were amazed by how powerful and simple this tool really was. It also had a wide range of applications, from memorizing vocabulary to learning general facts, and could easily be adapted to a mobile environment. So, we started our implementation process.

What is this simple yet very powerful tool that we call spaced repetition?

Spaced repetition, in short, is testing yourself on a fact repeatedly while spacing out the repetitions over time. Spaced repetition uses spacing effects which “demonstrate that learning is more effective when study sessions are spaced out.” You might be wondering who came up with this idea and how. Here’s is the history in a nutshell:

Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologic, discovered during his studies a phenomenon he called ‘the forgetting curve’. The forgetting curve shows how the memory of new information decays in the brain as time passes. However, he also realized that there were ways to fight this forgetting curve. He noted that we can stop this process of decay by reminding ourselves of the memory in different time intervals (“The Spacing Effect”).

Forgetting and remembering are more linked to each other than one might think. After each repetition, it will take more time to forget the information, that is why we “space out” our repetitions. Check out the following forgetting curves to understand the effect of spaced repetition on our memory:

In the first forgetting curve, you can see that the percentage retained decays over time, yet in the second one through spaced repetition the forgetting curve changes. In general, a memory’s “rate of decay” slows down each time you actively recall it. But when should we do this recalling process? To best recall and remember something, “you need to recall it just as you’re about to forget it.” These recalls have to spaced out in time because each time you recall something, the memory’s decay slows down meaning that it’ll take more time for you to forget it. (How To Remember Anything Forever-Ish).

How can we implement spaced repetition in our daily lives?

So, the mechanics are simple: you take a box, divide it into 7 levels (or use 7 different boxes). All of your cards start at the first level, and when you review a card and get it correct, the card goes up to the next level, and so on. The card retires when you reach your final level. You review by doubling the gap (number of days between reviews) for each level. For example, you will be reviewing level 1 cards every day, level two cards every 2 days, level three cards every four days, level four cards every eight days, and so on.

It seems easy enough, right? However, there are some important tricks when it comes to spaced repetition: Our memory is not an accumulation of different pieces: every bit of information we have in our brain is connected to each other and they cannot be considered separately. “Thus, to get the most out of Spaced Repetition, you must make your cards small, connected, and meaningful” (How To Remember Anything Forever-Ish)

All in all, spaced repetition is a learning life-hack and what makes it more interesting is that it is very easy to implement in our daily lives. Setting aside thirty-minutes every day to learn can change your mindset and approach. We remember in order to change, grow, and learn more. With spaced repetition, we can adopt a lifelong and continuous learning habit which is the most important skill of the 21st century. As Alvin Toffler wrote: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Why it is important to remember?

The worst part of learning new things is that sooner or later, we forget. The system in which we live is designed to make us forget and become indifferent, benumbed, and less aware. After some time, we even forget some meaningful events and experiences that we have had. Days, weeks, and months pass and get so overburdened with new and shiny information, that we start forgetting.

Last year, gun violence was a big issue that took a lot of media coverage. We were bombarded with images of kids crying, and we met some very courageous young kids who, after a horrific event, decided to try and move an entire country into action. Yet today, even though the situation is not solved, we have moved the conversation to the back burner and we have started slowly forgetting about the countless lives that were lost. And the media constantly switches gears to keep us “entertained” and glued to the TV. Personally, I am constantly traumatized when I see the news regarding sexual assault, harassment, and rape. However, even I start to forget as time passes by.

Yet, it is so wrong to forget: When we forget, we don’t take action, and when we don’t take action, nothing changes and increasingly more lives are affected by these situations. We have to remember to act in order to have an impact. Activism derives from never forgetting and taking action to build on the memory of that pain and anger. We achieve remembrance through spaced repetition because we break that cycle of continuous chaos and we remember what is important. We become active and responsible rather than passive and forgetful. We stop being bystanders and open ourselves up to feel and to take control. As the Mindhood family, we invite you to remember and act!

If you’re looking to start forming a new habit this month, try spaced repetition! You can use the most basic shoebox method or you can download our mobile application. When you start discovering how much your brain can learn and recall with such short, spaced-out repetitions, you’ll be happy you did!