YOU are walking down the street when your phone buzzes. 鈥淲hat is the capital of Maryland?鈥� it asks you. You know the answer but you can鈥檛 quite grasp it until all of a sudden you remember: 鈥淎nnapolis鈥�. The question prompted your brain just in time.
That is the scenario envisaged by the makers of software , which launched last week. It uses a basic principle of cognitive science called 鈥渟paced repetition鈥� to improve learning. To remember something long term, a student must return to it several times, increasing the interval between each revision. The concept isn鈥檛 new, but Cerego aims to harness the idea to let people learn anytime, anywhere.
鈥淭he amount of information we need to retain is growing rapidly,鈥� says Cerego co-founder Andrew Smith Lewis. 鈥淐urrent solutions do a fine job of bringing information to the screen, but we鈥檙e not seeing much on how we learn.鈥� Smith Lewis says Cerego鈥檚 grand ambition is to 鈥渉andle learning and relearning for the duration of the user鈥檚 lifetime鈥�.
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From the moment you log on to Cerego on a tablet or PC, the software tracks every move you make, learning about you: how long you take to answer questions, how much faster you answer when you鈥檝e seen a question before, which questions you skip and which questions you get wrong. That information is analysed to work out when you next need to see each piece of information. If you quickly and correctly give the capital of Maryland, for example, the system might wait two or three days before quizzing you on that fact again, and then double the interval after another correct answer. If you are wrong, the item may come up every few minutes until you improve.
聯From the moment you log on, the software tracks every move you make, learning about you聰
鈥淚t鈥檚 all very plausible and reasonable. They know their literature,鈥� says , an educational technology researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. 鈥淚 haven鈥檛 seen any commercial products that put together all these different things.鈥�
Cerego doesn鈥檛 yet have any published results to back up the claims made for the product. But Smith Lewis says they are working on this, and points to preliminary tests on language acquisition, run over five weeks at the University of Hawaii and reviewed by Cerego鈥檚 scientific adviser, at New York University. In those tests, users improved their retention of factual material by a factor of three compared to a visually identical system that didn鈥檛 run the spacing algorithm.
Another company, , has a different approach. Rather than concentrating on the time intervals between learning, Carnegie wants to improve how students grasp mathematics by helping them break down complex processes into chains of individual principles. Such 鈥減rocedural learning鈥� is something the brain does anyway.
Carnegie鈥檚 method analyses each step a student takes while solving a maths problem. If they make a mistake, it recommends more study in the specific mathematical operation they are weak in. The idea is to reinforce a particular step in the process, as well as the principles behind it.
鈥淭here is this tremendous potential to optimise human learning,鈥� says , a co-founder of Carnegie Learning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Computational aids that target how we absorb information 鈥� like spaced repetition or procedural learning 鈥� should improve our capacity for learning. At the moment, Cerego works only for lists of facts, like state capitals, but its makers plan to expand it to become a platform for learning anything, from recipes to the complex skills required for jobs like flying a plane.
Smith Lewis says the company plans to use the data it gathers on its students to offer a certification service, allowing users to show off what they know to employers, for example.
