Employ Learning Boosters to “Reset” the Forgetting Curve

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve suggests that we easily forget 70% of the content we learned with 24 hours of learning it. The “mental noise” that learners return to back on the job and in their personal lives crowds out the things they just learned to help them do their jobs better. Consider that fact within a conference setting where learners might attend 9-12 sessions in a three-day period and you have even more “noise” to contend with.

Enter the learning booster. A booster is a short interaction used to nudge the learner’s memory of the learning experience and “rest” the forgetting curve. A booster could take the form of:

1.  A knowledge check with a single multiple choice question
2. A poll question designed to require the learner to think about an application of the learning and give an opinion
3. An open-ended question asking the learner to give an example of how they applied a concept covered in the training. 

A series of three boosters on a set cadence of 2-2-2 (2 days, 2 weeks, and 2 months after the learning event)  is powerful enough to “reset” the forgetting curve.  The examples in the previous paragraph illustrate, respectively, how each question requires the participant to apply higher-level thinking skills to respond to the boosters over time. Studies showed that a five second interaction with a booster was just as affective as a 30 second or five minute review at negating the forgetting curve.

How does it work? (Cue the brain science!) When we ask someone to remember a single fact about an experience, it nudges the brain to also recall adjacent facts that were part of that experience. Give it a try: Think about the last purchase you made, in person, in a retail establishment. What was one item that you bought? Now, what other memories sprang into your mind by just recalling that one item? Other items you bought? That one item you forgot to pick up? Seeing some one you know at the store? Something you decided not to buy and now you regret it? What the store looked like, smelled like? We just negated the memory curve and reinforced that memory for you. That memory will now be more accessible to you for the next two weeks.

Boosters should always be an opt-in opportunity. Even so, I’ve encountered multiple challenges providing opportunities for boosters in a large, global, corporate environment. For privacy reasons, and the fact that not everyone has a work-sponsored cell phone, we couldn’t get permission for opt-in texting. Email is a dead zone, and would only be used as a last resort. LinkedIn private groups weren’t an option because our audience (~900 employees) was too large to constantly monitor and validate membership requests.
The one tool that IT finally approved was Kahoot!. Kahoot! is a tool our kids have been using in school for years. It’s a gamified quiz that includes a leaderboard, displaying standings after every question. I facilitate mine like I’m calling a horse race, making note of who has moved up and who got knocked down, challenging everyone else to try to make it into the top five. I use our corporate recognition tool to reward points (that translate to local currency on a debit card) to the top three finishers.

I include a live five-question Kahoot! at the end of every session of our weekly virtual sales training. Topics are different every week, but there is always a “Pub Quiz” at the end of the training. It started out as an engagement strategy to keep learners engaged and prevent “Zoom Fatigue”. It’s been incredibly popular so I’ve found ways to leverage it as a booster:

1. Virtual Sales Kickoff–we scheduled a follow up “happy hour” Zoom session happening 1-2 days after each training session. This gave our learners time to digest the content, think about the key learnings, and formulate more questions to continue their learning. The happy hour was structured as an open forum so participants could ask their questions and explore ideas. We ended every happy hour with a pub quiz to reinforce the learning from the previous day. We plan to replicate this strategy when we return to in-person learning conferences.
2. Virtual Technical Sales Training–we built virtual showcase booths with video demos and downloadable resources. Each booth had an associated “Pub Quiz with Prizes” linking to a on-demand Kahoot! quiz. Participants could explore the booth, then show off what they learned by playing the pub quiz. The “prizes” were points sent through the recognition tool.

Here is an example of an on-demand Kahoot! quiz. It’s available until Oct 18, 2021, 11PM US Pacific time.

My next experiment will be to to allow participants to sign up for a 2-2-2 booster, delivered via email (because we still can’t text) for our top three critical topics covered in our 2022 sales kickoff conference, which will hopefully be held in person. I’m hoping to use a QR code they can scan, then enter their email address to produce a report for me. I’ll let you know how it goes.