Johnny Abacus recently reminded me of SuperMemo, which led me back to the work of Robert and Elizabeth Bjork on memory:
Both were steeped in the history of laboratory research on memory, and one of their goals was to get to the bottom of the spacing effect. They were also curious about the paradoxical tendency of older memories to become stronger with the passage of time, while more recent memories faded. Their explanation involved an elegant model with deeply counterintuitive implications.
Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength. Take an old address or phone number. Try to think of it; you may feel that it’s gone. But a single reminder could be enough to restore it for months or years. Conversely, some memories have high retrieval strength but low storage strength. Perhaps you’ve recently been told the names of the children of a new acquaintance. At this moment they may be easily accessible, but they are likely to be utterly forgotten in a few days, and a single repetition a month from now won’t do much to strengthen them at all.
The Bjorks were not the first psychologists to make this distinction, but they and a series of collaborators used a broad range of experimental data to show how these laws of memory wreak havoc on students and teachers. One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we’re learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future. “The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the extent they take current performance as their guide, are going to do the wrong things,” Robert Bjork says. “It’s almost sinister.”
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. “Go to Amazon and look at the reviews,” says Greg Keim, Rosetta Stone’s CTO, when I ask him what evidence he has that people are really remembering what they learn. “That is as objective as you can get in terms of a user’s sense of achievement.” The sole problem here, from the psychologists’ perspective, is that the user’s sense of achievement is exactly what we should most distrust.
Point one: free markets. The Rosetta Stone isn’t a scam; they’re selling the illusion of learning, and that’s what the buyers are in the market for. If they actually cared about learning they’d do some metrics to test it.
Point two: insufficient understanding of consciousness. The ‘sense of achievement’ isn’t. Ask the usual scientific question; how do you know it is a sense of achievement? For red, you can’t be mistaken. But ‘achievement’ is just a feeling you’ve associated with success. Why? The association might be valid. Or not.
If you ask for an illusion, and you get an illusion, you haven’t been scammed. I don’t think the customers buying Rosetta Stone software are asking for a magician’s act though. They don’t want the sense that they learned a foreign language; they want to learn that language. It’s a market failure — working to Rosetta Stone’s advantage, of course.
Then why are they so reliably satisfied with the sense of having learned the language?
I found out lawnmowers and weedwhackers work the same way. They could be quiet, but then nobody feels like they’re working.
The problem is that demonstrating Rosetta’s impotence shatters the illusion at the same time it repels supposedly honest customers.
Similarly, the other markets of this kind I’ve investigated all have effective alternatives, they’re just obscure and only professionals use them. The people who actually need the thing, not the illusion.
Why are people who want to learn a language reliably satisfied with the sense of having learned the language? Um, because they think they learned the language? Is this a trick question? They’re not seeking the illusion; they just can’t tell it from the real thing. (The professionals who use obscure alternatives are the ones who can see through the illusion.)
How can you try to use a skill you don’t have and not realize you don’t have it? They’re obviously buying these things, “learning” the language and never using it.
To me it’s like a programmer thoroughly learning the docs for a library without any intention to #include it. It’s just bizarre to consider.