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.
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.
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.
Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress.
SuperMemo is a program that keeps track of discrete bits of information you've learned and want to retain.
For example, say you're studying Spanish. Your chance of recalling a given word when you need it declines over
time according to a predictable pattern. SuperMemo tracks this so-called forgetting curve and reminds you to rehearse your knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped to, say, 90 percent.
Perhaps the things we learn — words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details — don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.
The disadvantage of this comforting notion is that it's false.
The most popular learning systems sold today — for instance, foreign language software like Rosetta Stone — cheerfully defy every one of the psychologists' warnings. With its constant feedback and easily accessible clues, Rosetta Stone brilliantly creates a sensation of progress.
As a professor and as a teacher, we think a lot about how do you teach kids who can't pay attention or are distracted by irrelevancy or don't keep their memory neatly organized? It's a scary, scary thought.
So what we're seeing is less of a notion of a big idea carried through and much more little bursts and snippets. And we see that across media, across film, across, in Web sites, this idea of just do a little bit and then you can run away.
anytime you switch from one task to another, there's something called the "task switch cost," which basically, imagine, is I've got to turn off this part of the brain and turn on this part of the brain. And it's not free; it takes time.
One of the biggest delusions we hear from students is, "I do five things at once because I don't have time to do them one at a time." And that turns out to be false. That is to say, they would actually be quicker if they did one thing, then the next thing, then the next. It may not be as fun, but they'd be more efficient.
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