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, bad at remembering?
German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus wondered the same thing. Asking 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 validated over the decades.
But there’s good news. He also discovered the antidote – the spacing effect, also known as 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, schedule 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.
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 showed six times the improvement in their reading skills after two weeks. So you’re getting more “bang for your buck.” In the same amount of time, your managers could be retaining even more information. And with Zoom fatigue being a concern these days, your employees will appreciate it.
Help your managers apply learnings in new ways.
The space in between training is when the real learning happens. You’re able to 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 truly start to “click.”
Employees aren’t always going to find the exact scenario or problem you’re trying to solve in their training. But by applying their learning to new scenarios, they can generalize that learning and use it as a solution for a variety of situations. Studies are beginning to explore learning beyond simple concepts, such as vocabulary words and visual acuity. Instead, they are focusing on the complex learning that is included in most L&D programs. One study examined the complex learning of food chains and found that when learning was spaced out, students were more easily able to generalize the knowledge.
How to apply spaced repetition to your programs
If you’re working on a training 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 at a later date.
- Set up nudges: Incorporate nudges into your program, such as a small Slack reminder a couple of days after the training with a key learning. Bonus points if it includes an experiential exercise for the manager to practice applying the learning.
By Fresia Jackson