Retention Myths (Strange things trainers believe)
Another oft quoted set of statistics often stated by trainers has to do with differing retention rates for different learning activities. Here’s a message on trainer posted, and my response.
Rita wrote:
> Thank you all for your feedback on training retention rate statistics. My
> apologies for this long message.
>
> I have the information now, although slightly backhandedly… what a
> fascinating excercise this has been, and I thank everyone who sent me
> clues to information.
>
> It turns out that Hermann Ebbinghaus, a 19th century German
> psychologist, discovered that people forget almost all of what they
> learn in a class within thirty days, and hundreds of studies have
> confirmed the “Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve” since his work was
> originally published. It’s a landmark theory describing not only how
> quickly people forget things following learning, but that overexposure to
> a lot of information can make things worse. The theory and Ebbinghaus’
> methodology are still taught in most university Psych programs today.
Rita, I’m sorry, but this is a misinterpretation of the data. Ebbinghaus worked on retention and the MEANINGFULNESS of what was learned, using a range of stimuli (word ranging from close to regular English, to random sets of three letters).
It has virtually NO application to the learning of meaningful data in training. Its only focus was on verbal learning of three letter “words”.
If I’m mistaken and he did work on retention of real world information and skills, please point me to the references.