Why all students need to revise and then revise again (and again)
During the normal course of a day at school a student might have 5 or 6 lesson periods in a day. This could feature starting with Maths, then Science then History then English and so on. Owing to the nature of the short term memory (sometimes called the working or auditory memory) that we all have it is highly likely that the lesson content of Maths is not going to survive beyond lunchtime. It is not surprising that information that goes into the short term memory early in the day is subsequently replaced with information from a later lesson.
This is why it sometimes seems that students have no memory or limited memory of a previous lesson: it is because they have indeed forgotten what they were taught 24 hours before. With all the factors affecting a young person’s life (home life, social media, sports clubs, gaming) all taking up headspace we, as teachers, shouldn’t be surprised by blank looks when we’re going through a recall task from the previous lesson. If we are mindful of this we can (and indeed, should) build repetition into our lessons.
Is there a solution? Yes there is but it takes practice and a desire to revisit topics over again. In the 1880s Hermann Ebbinghaus proposed the “Forgetting Curve”. His research showed that people lose a significant proportion of what they are taught soon after the teaching process is over. Imagine a student listening to their teacher explaining how to balance chemical equations. It is likely that much won’t be remembered for long. If, however, that same student happens to really enjoy History much more than Science then their retention, for example, of the factors leading up the outbreak of the First World War might not be forgotten so easily.
Looking at Ebbinhaus’s Forgetting Curve we can see that within 24 hours 80% of that which was learned in class has been lost and without intervention the loss will continue. However, if the information is revisited and practiced or rehearsed the time period taken to lose 80% of the knowledge becomes extended ie the student retains that information for longer. This pattern remains the same on every review.
Clearly then, we can see that knowledge retention is enhanced every time a student revises that topic. This seems to justify the need to repeat revision sessions and revise topics again and again until retention time is extended as far as possible.
It follows that every revision programme should build in sections where content is reviewed over and over again. Revising a topic once just isn’t enough. This is made clear by Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve. Good teachers and tutors will be aware of this curve and will build that knowledge into student revision plans.
