The Learning Curve

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

The Learning Curve.  The Learning Curve shows that the most significant gains in retention occur right after a concept is introduced and as time goes on less and less information is retained.

Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist born in 1850, is most famous for discovering the most depressing fact in education.  People usually forget 90% of what they learn in class within 30 days.  Also, the majority of forgetting occurs within the first few hours after class.

In publishing his Forgetting Curve, Ebbinghaus pioneered the experimental study of memory and performed the first real science-based inquiry into human learning.  He is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and was the first person to describe the learning curve.  Both have been confirmed many times since.

Ebbinghaus developed a list of 200 nonsense words, each containing 3 letters, a consonant, vowel, consonant: TAZ, LEF, RIN, ZUG.  He then spent the rest of his life trying to remember lists of these words and in varying combinations and lengths.

His findings reveal that some memories are only for a few minutes, then vanish, while other memories persist for days/months, even over a lifetime.

He also discovered two other noteworthy factors pertaining to learning: the Learning Curve and the spacing effect that is addressed as a separate topic on this website.

The Learning Curve refers to how fast we learn information.  As shown on the chart, the sharpest learning increases occur after the first try, and then gradually evens out.  This means that less and less information is retained after each repetition.  Like the Forgetting Curve, the Learning Curve is exponential.

Just as with the Forgetting Curve, Ebbinghaus was the first to demonstrate the existence of two types of memory systems: “short form and long form,” and furthermore, that repetition can convert “short form” into “long form” under certain conditions.