Have you ever had that experience where you bring back a concept or content from earlier in the school year with your students and you get blank stares. You know you taught them, and you know they learned because they showed their knowledge and skills on the assessment at the time, yet here they are, giving you a look of incomprehension. 

I’m thinking about this conundrum as we head into the last six-ish weeks of school. We know so much more now about how to help students to both gain and retain conceptual knowledge and skills as well as content, yet in the swirl of the academic year, when there is so much content to cover and standards to meet, being able to find ways to practice with previous learning so that students retain it can be really difficult. Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve helps us to understand what’s going on, but as a teacher pushed for time, what can you do?

The Forgetting Curve, proposed by Hermann Ebbinghaus, explains why our students seem to have forgotten what they previously learned. It shows that memory retention drops sharply after initial learning, with the steepest drop occurring within the first few days or weeks. However, the curve flattens out over time, meaning that once information has been retained for a longer period, it becomes more resistant to forgetting.

This is where spaced practice comes into play. Spaced practice, also known as distributed practice, involves breaking up the learning process into multiple sessions spread out over time, rather than cramming everything into a single session. By periodically reviewing and reinforcing the material, spaced practice helps to solidify it in long-term memory.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/forgetting-curve-yurii-nazarenko

But as teachers, finding the time and resources to implement effective spaced practice can be challenging. That’s where AI can be a valuable ally.

AI-powered learning platforms can personalize the learning experience for each student, scheduling spaced review sessions at optimal intervals tailored to their individual needs. In addition, these platforms can create content that is based on your individual students’ interests, which can also increase brain connections and help with retrieval. Automated quizzing and testing can incorporate retrieval practice, a key component of spaced practice, allowing students to actively recall and reinforce the learned material.

A well developed prompt or bot can provide personalized feedback and support during spaced review sessions, identifying areas of weakness or misconceptions and adapting their guidance accordingly. You can create your own bot for this on Mizou or SchoolAI.

Moreover, AI can analyze students’ learning patterns, performance data, and engagement levels to identify the most effective spacing intervals and review schedules, optimizing the spaced practice strategy for your specific students or classes. You can use Grapha (my personal favorite) or ChatGPT’s Data Analyst. (There are a bunch of other GPTs for data analysis in the GPT store). 

By leveraging AI’s capabilities in personalization, adaptive learning, automated assessment, and data analysis, teachers can more effectively implement spaced practice strategies and take advantage of the forgetting curve to promote long-term retention and deeper understanding among their students.

By integrating AI into your repertoire, you can better manage the time constraints and content demands of the academic year while ensuring that your students truly learn and retain the knowledge, understanding, and skills they need.

So, the next time you’re met with those blank stares, remember the forgetting curve and the power of spaced practice – and don’t hesitate to enlist the help of AI to make it a reality in your classroom.