Get some educators or instructors into a room and before long you will get an earful about good teaching practices, pedagogy, learning, and so forth. You’ll hear all the latest info about how best to get kids to pay attention, how to reach adult learners, presentation and communications. But what is less often talked about is the matter of retention.

For me, learning is easy. This is no big deal; most people learn things easily. The problem is hanging on to it. Think of a photographic memory with no film (or memory chip for those of you under 30).

The standard solution to this problem has always been repetition. Think of the old formula that describes a government handbook: tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em. The problem is that repetition by itself will only take one so far. For decades the field of cognitive psychology has been aware of an interesting phenomenon that concerns review and retention. Studies show that the best time to review something is just before you start to forget it. Let’s say you’re taking a Spanish class and you want to review vocabulary words. You’ve got you stack of flash cards for the day and you go through them until you have them memorized.

So far, so good. But the problem is that everyone starts to forget what they have recently learned at a fairly rapid rate. The time to review is when you’re chances of remembering any one of those words is around 90%. So when you reach that point (say the next day) you review them again. But this time, your forgetting curve is not so steep. It might take three days before you have a 90% chance of recalling one of those words. But if you review them after three days, they’ll stick for maybe another five or six days, and so on. Cognitive psychologists figure that if you go through this routine about four times, the material will stick.

The problem is the timing.

How do you know when you’ve reached that critical just-about-to-forget threshold? This curve is different for each person, and I suspect is probably also different at different times in a person’s life. It may also be different depending on the subject matter. For a person to figure this out on their own is essentially impractical. So teachers have continued to plod along with badly timed reviews or material while the cognitive psychologists have been tearing their collective hair out because while the answer to retaining knowledge is clear, the way to implement it is not.

However, a program called SuperMemo looks like it can address this issue. SuperMemo is written by Piotr Wozniak, a Polish computer scientist who has written an algorithm to figure out a person’s optimal learning and retention profile. It displays knowledge that someone wants to learn and does so at the right time to ensure optimum retention. There is an excellent article in the current edition of Wired about this, and I recommend it highly. You would also do well to check out the SuperMemo web site, which has a lot of good articles and information both on the program itself and the concepts behind it.

Right now, SuperMemo is available for most PC platforms, Linux, and even a web-based version. Alas, for Macintosh nuts like me there is not yet a version available, but there are other programs that use similar algorithms to accomplish the same task. One is called Genius, which runs on OS X and seems to be pretty good although the library of user-supplied content was not all that inspiring. Another is a web-based site called MindPicnic, located, oddly enough, at www.mindpicnic.com. I’m currently test-driving MindPicnic for one of my current projects, namely learning modern Greek. They happen to have several packages of cards that address this very topic. So far, although it can be arduous and even tedious at times, it seems to be working. The display shows my how many cards I’ve been through, how long it’s been since I looked at any cards, and so on. It also has a handy bar graph that shows how much I’ve learned, and that percentage goes down over time unless I review. What it does not tell me is what my optimal intervals for review are. That would be very helpful.

But this brings us to the bottleneck in this new avenue of learning: content. Someone has to sit down and actually put in the data that you want to learn. Unless you’re learning something that everyone wants to know, or you get lucky the way I did, that’s your job. From an optimistic standpoint, if these kinds of software start becoming more and more popular, there should be an increase in the numbers and varieties of content available. There’s quite a bit out there at present, but I’d like to see more. This might be another good reason to form learning circles or informal study associations and groups. If the content problem can be solved, this could cause a real shakeup in how we teach and learn and educate each other and ourselves.

There’s more to say on the subject of learning and retention and the philosophy of education, but for now, check out these resources and see if they make a difference in your personal educational program.