Experiments on learning in school situations.

Long-term retention of basic science knowledge: a review study

“…Using himself as the single participant in his studies, Ebbinghaus investigated the retention of nonsense syllables after retention intervals of different lengths, with the aim of discovering 'pure' measures of retention. Quite consistently, he found what later came to be called the 'Ebbinghaus' curve of forgetting,' that is, a negatively accelerated forgetting function (e.g., Stroud 1940). This function is characterized by large losses at short retention intervals, after which the curve levels off to smaller (but incremental) losses at longer intervals.…”

“…In the analysis, retention is related to the participants' knowledge level at the end of the exposure (often expressed as number and level of courses attended) and the length of the RI. Due to the non-longitudinal character of this type of study, retention curves can only be reconstructed, though reliable information about the amount or proportion of forgetting can be collected (Stroud 1940). For those long time spans, groups of participants who have learned the material under similar circumstances may be hard to find (Bahrick 1993;Schmidt et al 2000); in fact, it may not entirely be clear whether they learned the same knowledge at all, in particular for knowledge domains that change over time (Day et al 1988).…”

Learning From Verbal Discourse in Educational Media: A Review of the Literature

“…The first full review of research literature in this area appears to have been the one by Welborn and English (1937), who were concerned mainly with the differences between what they called "verbatim" and "logical" learning. (Roughly, "verbatim" learning is learning of a discourse, i. e., its exact words, while "logical" learning is learning from a discourse, i.e., its content~d ideas.) Stroud (1940) touched on certain problems of MVD learnir.g in his review of research in school learning. Although a number of psychologists have mounted research programs on learning from t4VD (e.g., Cofer, 1941Cofer, , 1956) there appears to have been no major literature review of findings since the Welborn and English review cited above.…”

Recall of Verbal Materials After a Four-Year Interval

“…Relatively few studies have been concerned with the retention of verbal materials over extended time intervals, and this · has been especially true with respect to the recall method of measuring retention ( 3,4,5,6). The present note reports a few data which · are relevant to this question .…”