Picture this: You’ve spent weeks finding the perfect vendor for your manager training, or better yet crafting your own program. Your managers log in and spend two hours learning the basics of giving good feedback, and practicing with one another, and at the end, they all say it was a valuable use of their time and they learned a lot. But in the following weeks, you hear comments from employees that things aren’t any better. Why does this happen? Why are humans so good at forgetting? And conversely, so bad at remembering?
German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus wondered the same thing. He asked the questions, “How quickly do we forget things?” and “How can we prevent it?” He took matters into his own hands. Ebbinghaus performed experiments on himself, memorizing unintelligible syllables and then seeing how quickly he forgot them. He found that within a day, 70% of what he learned had already been lost. And even though his experiments happened over a century ago, his findings have been proven true over the decades.
But there’s good news. He also found the antidote—the spacing effect or spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is the act of distributing learning over time. For example, instead of spending two hours in a workshop on one day, plan half-hour workshops across four days. Through spacing, the forgetting curve—that is, how quickly someone forgets what they learned—is softened, and some magic happens. Learners not only retain more information, but they’re also able to apply that learning in new ways.
How to use spaced repetition
Retain learning
Retention—or the opposite of forgetting—is of course both the benefit and the goal of spaced repetition. It’s not enough for employees to learn something during training; it’s important for employees to keep it at the top of their minds for months and maybe years to come. According to one study, spaced repetition helped students improve their recall (accuracy on the test) by up to 150%. However, it’s not just successful in the laboratory or classroom; the spacing effect has also been demonstrated in the workplace.
Be more efficient with your managers’ time
Asking your employees to spend more time training to get the lessons to stick can seem like the solution. But the best part of spaced repetition is that it doesn’t require more time. What matters is how you break it up. When first graders were taught in three two-minute sessions a day, instead of a single six-minute session, they saw six times the improvement in their reading skills after two weeks. So you’re getting more “bang for your buck”—your managers could retain even more information in the same amount of time. And with Zoom fatigue, I’m sure your employees will thank you.
Help your managers apply learnings in new ways
The space in between training is when the real learning happens. You can commit the learning to memory, start to make connections to how it applies in your day-to-day work, and test out the application of the concepts. In short, the “space” is where things start to “click.”
Employees aren’t always going to find the exact scenario or problem you’re trying to solve in their training. However, by applying their learning to new scenarios, they can generalize that learning and use it as a solution for various situations. Studies are beginning to research beyond simple learning, such as vocabulary words and visual acuity. Instead, they focus on the complex learning included in most L&D programs. One study looked at the complex learning of food chains and found that if the teaching was spaced out, students could more easily generalize.
How to apply spaced repetition to your programs
If you’re working on a training program right now and want to apply the magic of the spacing effect, here are three quick tips:
- Break it up: Break your training down into shorter sessions spread across multiple days. The optimal gap depends on the specific learning objectives, but typically one day in between is best.
- Use a refresher: If you can’t break up your training across multiple days, consider having a short refresher training later.
- Set up nudges: Incorporate nudges into your program, like a small Slack reminder a few days after the training with a key learning. Bonus points if it includes an experiential exercise for the manager to practice using the learning.
By Fresia Jackson