How to Get Students to Retain Learning Concepts
Getting students to retain learning concepts is a huge pain point for professors in 2022. No matter how hard professors teach, and no matter how hard students study, there is always going to be a gap between what is learned and what is forgotten. Some lessons don’t always take root on the first try. Fortunately, education has evolved tremendously over the centuries and in recent decades our study of education has helped to discover ways to improve learning retention.
In this article, we will explore why students forget and provide some strategies based on modern education theory that have allowed information retention to be improved.
"By putting key theoretical concepts into practice, participants are better able to retain the learnings than through traditional learning methods" - StratX Simulations
Why Do Students Forget?
Our brains are wired to forget, it’s in our human coding.
In The Persistence and Transience of Memory, neurobiologists Blake Richard and Paul Frankland explain that forgetting is a purposeful process that helps our brains to optimize decision-making. This optimization process is our brain’s way of choosing which information will aid our survival, and which will not, seemingly a primordial mechanism from our days as hunters and foragers.
This finding has encouraged researchers to look deeper into how the brain takes in new information and what it does with it. Armed with this knowledge, it’s easier to develop strategies to hack our cerebral hard-wiring. The important thing to remember moving forward is that students forgetting what you teach them is not a failure of their memory, but a sign that their brain doesn’t deem it to be critical information. Through the following strategies, we can somewhat trick the brain to change its mind on that…
Information Consolidation Techniques
Things that we ‘learn’ that are not used, refreshed, or challenged, are more likely to be forgotten. If we do not consolidate our studies with follow-ups or repetition, we may be doomed to lose the information. Here are some ways that professors can help their students to remember what they are learning:
- Peer-to-peer explanations: Professors can invite their students to explain what they have learned, giving an opportunity for them to reactivate their knowledge, strengthen it in their minds, and increase overall retention
- Regular practice tests: Instead of reviewing material over and over, frequent testing gives aid to long-term information retention and helps students to manage their exam performance. Many students panic in exam situations because they are not well versed in the setup, which impairs their memory recall and may convince them that they are not effective at retaining learning concepts. Tests do not need to be graded, but they do need to go through the core study material on a frequent basis
- Spacing: Teachers may want to consider introducing recaps of material studied weeks or even months ago, giving students the chance to review their learnings in a casual way. This same methodology applies to homework - why not give homework based on a topic taught a month ago? That will show if they really learned it and will work the brain to not forget it
Experiential Learning Through Business Simulations
Business simulations are gamified experiential learning activities that place students in certain business roles that teach them about key industry concepts, business functions, how departments work together, and more. Every role in a business simulation is important to its overall success, and through the running of a virtual company, virtual product launch, or another simulation scenario, students will be offered a mixture of passive and active learning opportunities.
Our research has found that students learn better when they are challenged and motivated, which is why the simulations are so conducive to learning retention. Participants are invited to receive and digest information, make informed choices, and reflect on the impacts of their decisions, much like most boar