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Use refresh reviews to keep your knowledge for the long term

I’ve discussed using regular repetition to improve your learning. Now let’s look at the impact of forgetting. How much do we forget after a single lesson? Look at the graph below.

Look at the shaded area to the left of the graph. It shows that we typically forget eighty percent of new information within the first twenty-four hours of the first lesson. With repetition and review though, we can eventually achieve significant recall. Regularly reviewing your material improves your overall recall of material as time progresses. Alternatively, if you do not use what you have learned, you will start to lose it.

Many of our current training approaches do not recognize the need for refresh reviews. This I believe is a fundamental flaw and reflects the view that passing an exam or test is the main objective of the course. You should judge the success of a training course on the use and retention of the training material after six, twelve and twenty-four months. The refresh review is a key strategy to help you achieve long-term retention.

Refreshing reviews don’t have to take long. They may take a few minutes a week or a few hours a month. You can vary the time depending on how important the knowledge is and how often you use it. Review your content, redo some techniques, perhaps run a few visualizations or jump in the simulator. This helps restore and strengthen the links your mind has made and ensures those links do not wither away with time.

Regular reviews mean you don’t have to start from scratch in twelve months when you realize you cannot remember the links and mnemonics you created during your training.

Let’s now consider what to review, when to review and how deep you should go.

What to review

When I introduced the knowledge storage types (facts, principles, skills, procedures etc.), I mentioned the brain stores these in different ways in the brain. Because of these differences, you also forget these types of knowledge at different rates.

Automatic skills need less refresh. For example, once you have learned to ride a bike, you will likely remember for the rest of your life. You will typically forget facts, concepts and principles before you forget automatic skills. Procedural memories also weaken fast, especially when there is no cuing or prompting by the environment. This is why pilots and other similar professionals have to practice complex procedures to stay current.

Let’s use an emergency flight procedure, a forced landing sequence, as an example. A pilot doesn’t use this procedure often, so it’s likely they will forget parts of it. When it’s time to use it though, in a real emergency, the pilot may not remember all of it. This is especially true while under pressure. The pilot could help prevent this by spending some time every three months on a PC-based simulator, and practicing the routine in an aircraft at least once a year.

Similarly, if you have recently done a course on public speaking, you may want to spend a few minutes each month reviewing what you learned. Stand up and practice a few techniques. This is important if you don’t get many opportunities to present for a while after the course.

In summary, use this as a guide to decide what to review and how often:

·  Review more often: Facts, concepts, principles and procedures.

·  Review less often: Automatic motor skills and higher-level cognitive skills.

When to review

When you are learning new material, you need review it often. This is mainly the role of repetition (as we’ve just discussed) as you build your knowledge. At some point, usually after an exam or at the end of a course, you need to adopt a refresh review schedule that helps you keep your knowledge.

You may want to start with a review session once a month, and then move it to longer or shorter periods, as you feel necessary to keep your knowledge. Set aside some time in your calendar, and keep to your schedule.

Some tools (such as SuperMemo, discussed soon) can help manage your reviews. These allow you to do daily reviews, but without a large time commitment.

Using what you’ve learned lessens the need for scheduled reviews. Alternatively, keeping up a regular review during long stints away from an activity can reduce the time it takes to “get back into it” when you return. Adapt your review schedule to match how often you are using what you’ve learned.

Depth of Review

You do not need to review everything to a deep level each time you perform a refresh review. Simply reading some material is sometimes enough to invigorate those facts and principles again. You can step through procedures, for example, using visualization or a simulator. You don’t need to use the real equipment every time.

If you are not using what you’ve learned regularly, you may want to aim to cover all the content from your course over a two to three month period. You can vary this cycle based on how important or complex the material is, and how long you’ve been reviewing it.

You may also want to reassess your material to check what needs to be automatic, working and supporting knowledge. Often these needs change after you have completed the course or exam. If you no longer need to memorize some content, set up a system or reference that allows you to find it when you need it. You can also adapt what you cover in your reviews to match these needs.