Day 6: The key distinction that causes some of your skills to deteriorate while others last a lifetime

This is a temporary archive of the 2015 Learn Faster bootcamp emails. After Monday, July 6th, 2015, this will be removed. If you want to get access to the other emails in this series, please sign up here.

This is the sixth day in the Learn Faster bootcamp. Today I’m going to share an interesting scientific result that looked at how much people remember from classes they’ve taken (warning: it’s not good) and what was the key difference in the select group of people who didn’t seem to forget what they had learned.

In case you missed them, here is the temporary archive of the previous five lessons:

Day 1: How to stop forgetting what you read
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/06/22/stop-forgetting/

Day 2: What matters more: method or motivation? The answer might surprise you…
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/bootcamp-2015-day-2/

Day 3: How to learn backwards (and why it will actually save you time)
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/bootcamp-2015-day-3/

Day 4: How I was able to put in 8+ hours of focus per day during the MIT Challenge
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/bootcamp-2015-day-4/

Day 5: How to learn subjects above your level
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/bootcamp-2015-day-5/

These emails are only going to be saved online temporarily. Afterwards, I’ll be moving them to the Learning on Steroids archive.

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How much do we retain from classes we’ve previously taken?

This question was addressed in an interesting study in 1991 by Harry Bahrick and Lynda Hall. In the study, they looked at how much of what students learn in a high-school algebra class is retained over very long periods of time (50+ years).

They looked at students who took the original algebra class and did follow-up tests at varying intervals later to see how much they remembered.

Not surprisingly, most of the students didn’t fare so well. Students steadily forgot the skills they had picked up in the class until, fifty years later, a large percentage of the students are little better than people who had never taken the class at all. Ouch.

But there was a group of students who didn’t seem to forget, and their abilities on subsequent algebra tests were nearly flat.
Who do you think they were?

One guess might be that they were the good students from the first class. After all, if you were good at algebra, presumably you wouldn’t forget it as easily.

Surprisingly, this wasn’t the case.

Students who scored A’s in algebra did remember more on later tests than the B and C students. But they forgot at exactly the same rate.
This might be a bit confusing, so let me explain. Top-scoring students did better than poorer scoring students when they were initially tested. They also scored better than their poorer-scoring classmates on later tests. This is unsurprising—after all, if you learned more to begin with, or had greater ability with the subject, we would expect you to do better in later tests as well.

However, the rate at which students forgot, the percentage of knowledge that decays over time was the same regardless of whether the students were top of their class or the bottom. Poorer students had less skill to begin with, but the ravages of forgetting hit good students as well as poor ones.

Being good in a subject doesn’t mean you won’t forget it later.

If it wasn’t how well the students scored, what did determine who retained their skills better later?

In this case it was something surprising. Students who took calculus forgot very little of the algebra. Studying beyond the current subject made it very hard for them to forget it.

Because of the identical forgetting curves of A, B and C students, we can also rule out the possibility that good students simply forget less. Instead, the additional practice of having to use algebra in a higher level seems to protect against losing skills.

This experiment underscores a powerful principle of learning called overlearning. Overlearning is practicing something you’re already so good at that improvements aren’t measurable anymore. Overlearning may no longer produce measurable improvements in ability, but it does protect against subsequent loss of skill.

What you overlearn you won’t forget.

How can you use this principle in your own learning?

Obviously repetitively practicing things you’re already good at isn’t very fun. Instead, I think the best way to implement this in your life is the same way the algebra students did. Namely, if you want to maintain a skill, practice it to a level higher than the level you want to maintain it at.

If you want to always remember algebra, study calculus.
If you want to always remember the basics of a language, practice to a level where you can easily have longer conversations.

If you want to keep your basic programming skills, practice with advanced courses.

The principle of overlearning also offers a defense against a common critique of education: that you learn a lot of complicated theories and tools that are far more than you’ll ever need to use in real life. As long as the complex tools you use build on the simpler basic patterns you want to master, it may be that learning the unnecessary tools will help you retain the basic ones for a lifetime.

Take Action Now

What skills and bodies of knowledge are important for you to maintain? What is a way you could practice the skill at one level above the ability you want to sustain lifelong?

Try using this now:

Pick a skill that is important to you. It could be a language, professional skill or body of knowledge you need to sustain.
Define a challenge, class or extension of the skill that is above your current abilities. Importantly, the new learning must make extensive use of your current skills, if it only uses a small fraction, you might not gain much benefit.
Start tackling your more advanced project, which will seal in your current abilities much longer.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow I’ll be sharing the final strategy for this bootcamp. Even though the bootcamp will be ending soon, the opportunity to continue improving how you learn is not. On Monday, June 29th, I’ll be reopening Learning on Steroids for the very last time, and you can get access to far more ideas which will help you learn better in your studies, work and life.