Tips for learning retention

Donald Clark Plan B has one of his useful posts that restates well-known (but often neglected) learning principles. It is worth reading, but I follow his advise and summarize it for my own benefit.

Ebbinghaus Curve.

He starts with a classical Ebbinghaus "forgetting curve" that we all learned about in Psychology 101 and then adds:

"The real solution, to this massive problem of forgetfulness, is spaced practice, little and often, the regular rehearsal and practice of the knowledge/skill over a period of time to elaborate and allow deep processing to fix long-term memories. If we get this right, increases on the productivity of learning can be enormous."

Here are some of his tips for for implementation (get the details from his blog post):

1. Self-rehearsal, rehearse the work yourself on a set schedule.
2. Take notes, and rehearse.
3. Blog about it, and respond to comments
4. Repetition, mindfully.
5. Delayed assessment, by the teacher at different intervals.
6. Record material, and make recordings accessible to learners.
7. Games pedagogy, present and assess in games format.
8. Spaced e-learning (ties in with #6).
9. Mobile technology, use cell phones to drip feed information.
10. Less long holidays (not as applicable in South Africa where we do not have the long summer holiday.

Some of these may be difficult to implement at school level, with limited resources and the high work load of teachers. Collaboration may be helpful.

The science of thinking smarter

The Harvard Business Review has this excellent take on neuroscience and management by Dr John Medina in The science of thinking smarter. In the article some telling statements are made about the appropriateness of so-called brain based management:

"... there’s a lot of hype about the benefits that recent developments in brain science might bring—for example, the popular notion that executives can become better leaders by emulating the “management” secrets of the human brain. Unfortunately, if you truly emulated the management secrets of the brain, you would create an organization that ran something like the stock-market floor in the closing minutes of Black Friday."

and ...

"I would encourage businesspeople to be a little bit skeptical about what they read in the popular press. Occasionally, I’ll pick up an article in a magazine that says the new brain science can improve the practice of business, and I’ll say, “Really?” I speak several dialects of brain science and feel comfortable in behavioral, cellular, and molecular biology, and I know very little about how brain science can yet be applied to business. Obviously we all have brains and we use them all the time in business. But it’s just too early to tell how the revolution in neuroscience is going to affect the way executives run their organizations."

I believe that these statements are as true for school education as they are for management practices. Both education and management consultants have jumped on the brainwagon and are riding it for all they're worth - and through the gullibility of their clients, they're worth a lot (pun intended).

Dr Medina nevertheless has some established facts that he considers potentially useful for executives (teachers also take note!):

The effect of stress

He points out that the that the brain and the body are adapted to deal with acute stress, but not with chronic stress. The hippocampus is especially vulnerable to the effects of stress, which leads to decreases in cognitive performance in highly stressed people. This of course must impact on the performance of stressed managers. Dr Medina indicates that neuroscience cannot yet predict which people will be resilient to the effects of stress, but is starting to develope some idea of the genetic makeup of stress vulnerable people.

Is memory reliable?

According to Dr Medina, the brain is geared to survival and will therefore change the perception of reality to serve the purpose of survival. The brain does not record reality reliably, but both short and long term memory are easily modifiable. The way to "fix" long term memory is through repetition, specifically elaborative rehearsal.

Are our childhood experiences our destiny?

Education has many meaningless slogans, but Dr Medina shows that one at least is true: "We are lifelong learners". He points out the greater optimism currently about brain plasticity up to old age. Activity and stimulation rewires and expands the brain. The implication is that our childhood experiences do not determine our destiny. This is a very complex issue, however, and may need to be looked into in more detail in future posting.

Is exercise good for the brain?

Medina strongly supports exercise as beneficial for brain health, specifically because of the benefit to the vascular system. He indicates that the majority of Alzheimer's cases are probably not genetic, but rather the result of multiple minor infarcts.

Is there merit in psychological testing, such as the Myers-Briggs?

Here again a direct quote from Dr Medina seems appropriate:

"I have a very specific objection to how these tests are sometimes hyped. I’ve heard people claim that tests such as Myers-Briggs are based on “sound neurological principles”—that brain science proves their validity, or even that these tests were designed with brain science in mind. The fact is that most of these tests—including IQ tests—were developed long before we knew very much about how the brain processes anything."

Therapy for corporate Alzheimers

Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon had an interesting post on "Corporate Alzheimers". Lambe described how rapid turnover of staff in public and commercial corporates could lead to loss of organisational memory, particularly for slow moving events, such as developing tax policy or running major engineering projects.

Clinical and cognitive neuropsychological memory research have some useful metaphors for corporate memory loss. Now I should immediately add that brain based anything is often nonsense, i.e. brain based teaching and brain based business. Consultants and trainers often use the status of the neurosciences to sell their pseudoscientific approaches to gullible clients. Alternatively they try so sell neuroscience based ideas long before stable bodies of research have been established and before practical applications have been demonstrated for said ideas. That's why I emphasize that in discussing the mapping of personal memory on to organisational memory, I'm using a metaphor. Granted, corporate memory is largely dependent on individuals' memories - the metaphor is thus a strong one. One proviso - those individuals will hopefully not be dementic!

This article on organisational memory has a useful way of mapping cognitive memory concepts to organisational ones:

Procedural memory - work routines (I would add technical skills)

Semantic memory - personnel & accounting records, policies

Episodic memory - stories & myths, critical incidents and other information related to a specific event or time

Lambe referred to corporate Alzheimers. Alzheimers Disease in its early stages typically affects declarative memory, which is considered to consist of semantic and episodic memory. Procedural memory deficits on the other hand, is more characteristic of Parkinson's Disease. Together I believe these dementic processes form a useful metaphor for corporate memory loss.

South Africa currently has major problems with the maintenance of its infrastructure. This affects the power network, the water reticulation and sewerage systems, the dams, the roads and much more. It is widely accepted that this is largely due to the wholesale loss of competent administrators, technicians and engineers since the early 90's. In the case of the electricity supplier, ESKOM, there was not only a turnover of staff, the workforce was almost halved.

As Patrick Lambe indicated, such staff depletion in organisations with activities that span generations, had to cause major corporate memory loss. As this happened at the time of the transition for apartheid to democracy, there was also bound to be attitudinal issues on both sides (outgoing and incoming staff) that could have compromised knowledge transfer. Those issues are now history and we have to look forward.

There seems to be a realisation among all concerned that the knowledge and skills of displaced administrators, technicians and engineers need to be captured and harnessed. The question is how to do it? How can the knowledge of those who left, be captured and lost corporate memories restored?

Two quotations by Dave Snowden from Cognitive Edge are applicable here. The first is:

"We always know more than we can say, and we can always say more than we can write down".

Following on this, I believe that the best way to capture lost individual knowledge and to restore corporate memories, is to capture the knowledge of those who left and who may be returning (even if only temporarily) in narrative form. Just contracting them to write things down (i.e. manuals) will help, but too much which is important will be lost.

The second is:

"Knowledge can only be volunteered; it can never be conscripted".

The full cooperation of not only displaced persons, but also of current incumbents will be crucial. Lost memories will have to be recovered, but will also have to be integrated with new knowledge and new systems. This will require tact, wisdom and leadership from the management of organisations who have suffered corporate memory loss. It seems to me that these processes will of necessity have to be outsourced - I cannot see how an organisation can recover its own memories. Therapy to recover memory in a brain injured person, can be seen as the metaphor for such a process.

Let's trust that South African state and parastatal organisations find ways to recover their lost corporate memory and return to sanity. They need not look further than Cognitive Edge and its South African affiliate, Sonja Blignaut, to assist them.

Polygraphs and eyewitness testimony - bad ideas?

Jeffry Ricker on the PESTS (Psychologists Educating Students to Think Skeptically) listserve alerted us to a post on polygraphing by Dan Greenberg on the Chronical Review. Greenberg points out that voluntarily undergoing a polygraph test (lie detector) is a bad idea due to a lack of scientific evidence for the reliability of such tests. He claims that "...it’s a voodoo device that can stain the innocent and exonerate the guilty."

Greenberg demonstrates how the device survived concerns about its scientific merits with an interesting quote from Richard Nixon: “I don’t know anything about polygraphs, and I don’t know how accurate they are, but I know they’ll scare hell out of people.”

One of the commenters on Greenberg's post points out that while screening polygraph tests may be suspect, directed issue tests are more accurate than eyewitness testimony. Which brings about the question, how accurate is eyewitness testimony? A Google search on eyewitness testimony brought me to an interesting example of memory misattribution.

An Australian eyewitness memory expert, Dr. Donald Thomson, was arrested for rape after he was identified by a rape victim as the rapist. At the time of the rape he was appearing on a live TV discussion about the unreliability of eyewitness memory. The raped woman had confused his face seen on TV with that of the rapist. The Australian police refused to accept his alibi, even though it was backed up by an assistant police commissioner who also appeared on the show, not to mention the studio audience and viewers! Which does not say much for the intelligence of the policemen involved (unless it was possible for Thomson to be in two places at once due to some weird quantum effect)! This incident from a book by Alan Baddeley, although I think it may have been mentioned before that by Daniel Schachter, both of them prominent memory experts.

Moral of the story? You agree to a screening polygraph test at your own peril. Consider perceptual distortions and unreliable memory when judging or challenging eyewitness testimony.