There is some incredible research into how we remember things that is only recently starting to see the light of day.  It’s just starting to leave the laboratory and turn into practical tools that we can use on a day to day basis.

Case in point: check out this video demo for a new service called Smart.fm.

The science behind this is good, and I think it is going to be really helpful as we start to see more innovations like this come to education.  The public school system is going to be slow to innovate and adopt new techniques like this, but they can enter the private sector (like tutoring) much quicker.

If you create an account on Smart.fm you can generate study lists for your students (or for yourself) and see the effect right away.  Or if you are trying to study something for yourself outside of a classroom there are already hundreds of study lists available on the site (rated by other users).

By the way, this is the same sort of research done by Piotr Wozniak which was covered in Wired magazine recently.  I’ve included an excerpt below from the Wired article:

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.

You can read the rest of the article here.

What do you think, will this be useful in education?  What techniques have you developed on your own to aid in studying the right material at the right time?

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