3 Ways to Help Students Overcome the Forgetting Curve

By Cathleen Beachboard
Edutopia

Summary

Teachers know the feeling well: a lesson lands beautifully, students are engaged, discussion is rich—and a week later, the learning seems to have vanished. In 3 Ways to Help Students Overcome the Forgetting Curve, educator Cathleen Beachboard reassures teachers that this experience is not a failure of instruction, but a predictable outcome of how human memory works. The good news, she argues, is that educators can dramatically improve retention through a few intentional instructional shifts that embed memory-building directly into daily teaching.

Beachboard grounds her argument in the well-established research of psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who identified the “forgetting curve” more than a century ago. His work—and more recent research, including a 2022 meta-analysis in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition—shows that without reinforcement, learners forget information rapidly: roughly half within an hour, three-quarters within a day, and up to 90 percent within a week. This forgetting is not a flaw in students’ brains, but a natural survival mechanism. Brains retain what is revisited, used, and connected—and discard what appears irrelevant.

Beachboard emphasizes that educators don’t need to redesign their entire curriculum to counter this reality. Instead, she proposes three practical, research-aligned strategies that strengthen memory by signaling to the brain that learning matters.

1. Immediate Recall

The first strategy centers on retrieval practice immediately after instruction. In Beachboard’s English classroom, this takes the form of a “brain dump.” At the end of a lesson, students close their notes and spend two to four minutes writing everything they can remember about the concept—definitions, examples, visuals, and personal connections—without worrying about accuracy or completeness.

While students may initially resist the productive struggle of recalling information unaided, they quickly grow to expect and value the routine. Brain dumps strengthen memory by requiring students to rephrase ideas in their own words, a process shown to significantly increase retention. For teachers, these quick writes double as formative assessments, revealing how students are organizing and understanding new knowledge in real time.

2. Personal Reflection

The second strategy focuses on elaborative encoding—building meaningful connections that anchor new learning. Beachboard describes a classroom “living wall,” where students post reflections responding to prompts such as “What surprised you?” or “Where might you use this skill outside of class?” As students add sticky notes during lessons and independent work, learning becomes visible, cumulative, and relational.

Over time, students revisit and connect earlier reflections to new concepts, literally mapping their growing understanding. This ongoing practice helps students weave new content into prior knowledge and real-life experiences, making learning more durable. Structured routines, such as weekly reflection sessions, gradually build student independence and deepen metacognition.

3. Immediate Use

The third strategy targets application. Beachboard argues that if students don’t use new learning quickly, forgetting is almost guaranteed. After short lessons, she immediately asks students to apply concepts through creative, low-stakes tasks: writing micro-stories, designing social media posts for literary characters, sketching metaphors, or explaining ideas to a younger audience.

Research cited from Brain Rules by John Medina supports this approach: immediate application shifts learning from fragile short-term memory to more durable long-term storage. The emphasis is on speed, authenticity, and creativity—not polish or perfection.

The Takeaway for Educators

Beachboard concludes that memory is not something students passively absorb; it is actively built through retrieval, reflection, application, and revisiting over time. When teachers embed these practices into instruction, students move beyond short-term memorization and become owners of their learning. The result is not only better retention, but students who understand how learning works—an essential skill for lifelong success.

Original Article

3 Ways to Help Students Overcome the Forgetting Curve

By Cathleen Beachboard Published June 13, 2025
Source URL: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/3-ways-to-help-students-ov...

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Prepared with the assistance of AI software

OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT (4) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com