I guess I wasn’t counting every little derivation or example or even formula that comes up in a class against that 90%. Those are things you see in lecture, but you don’t “learn” them. The stuff you actually learn is concepts and techniques, like what you would need to answer the test questions. Even that stuff, of course, you’ll mostly forget if you don’t review it regularly. But… I’m not very confident that you can strip out all the stuff you’re going to forget and still learn the stuff you would have remembered. I don’t know of any real examples of this working. It seems like maybe the academic system of “present a whole bunch of info rapidly and then force students to study key ideas from it for homework and tests” might have become entrenched over time because it performs better than the obvious alternatives.
I would love to see evidence of something better, though. It seems like good use of spaced repetition is a non-obvious candidate to replace the lecture-homework-test system. If you haven’t seen quantum.country, that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking of and my initial experience with it is promising.
I guess I wasn’t counting every little derivation or example or even formula that comes up in a class against that 90%. Those are things you see in lecture, but you don’t “learn” them. The stuff you actually learn is concepts and techniques, like what you would need to answer the test questions. Even that stuff, of course, you’ll mostly forget if you don’t review it regularly. But… I’m not very confident that you can strip out all the stuff you’re going to forget and still learn the stuff you would have remembered. I don’t know of any real examples of this working. It seems like maybe the academic system of “present a whole bunch of info rapidly and then force students to study key ideas from it for homework and tests” might have become entrenched over time because it performs better than the obvious alternatives.
I would love to see evidence of something better, though. It seems like good use of spaced repetition is a non-obvious candidate to replace the lecture-homework-test system. If you haven’t seen quantum.country, that’s the kind of thing I’m thinking of and my initial experience with it is promising.