When my son was in early high school, I wanted him to try out the method I explain here. He was glad to cooperate, so I asked him to choose something he wanted to learn and keep. Since he was immersed in school courses, I thought he might choose from one of them. He was developing his drumming skills, however, and picked out material on drum technique he wanted to master. We went through the process with positive results at the end.
But about fifteen years later, while working on my books about changing education, I mentioned to him that I was going to include his experience.
"Funny thing is, Dad," he responded. "I still remember that stuff."
Another experience. During my consulting travels, a female colleague mentioned to me that she was worried about an upcoming examination. She was studying to become a registered nurse, faced a test on the names for the 600 muscles in the body, and felt she just wasn't retaining them.
I explained the method to her in a couple minutes, didn't see her for a while, and then received a letter from her. She thanked me for the method, reported that she'd scored 97% on her test, and inquired if she could share the method with other nursing students, which of course I was delighted to encourage.
In my book, Effective Classroom Turnaround: Practice Makes Permanent (published by Bloomsbury) where you'll find more details, I refer to it as the Time Capsule method. It hinges on the answer to a question one might ask when trying to learn something: "How often do I need to return to this material to deepen it in my mind?" It occurred to me one day that the ideal "return" moment was just before any detail disappeared from memory. Recalling it right then, you "catch" what your memory already grasps, and build on it. Even after one minute, your memory has "recorded it", and you need only stretch the time interval between recalls to make it permanent. In practice, the depth of your memory for any material is how long you remember it perfectly.
For a class, explain and discuss the material first so everyone understands it, then divide it into "chunks". You can do it yourself, or invite your class to make chunks everyone can then use. Chunk size is limited to how many new details the mind can absorb at once, which appears to be around 5-7. For instance: Christopher Columbus sailed the Pinta, the Nina, and the Santa Maria to the Caribbean Ocean in 1492; three boat names, Columbus, the date, and the place-- six bits deserving memory effort. A "bit" is a detail that would be marked wrong if mistaken on a test.
Any kind of knowledge can go into the capsules-- math processes, foreign languages, grammar rules, vocabulary, story plots, steps in any sequence, historical narratives, parts of a whole, conditions behind events-- any information containing no more than seven novel "bits" students don't already know.
To install a chunk, begin with a one-minute interval. First, review it to make sure you already understand it and "have it in mind". Just focus on it. Next, turn your attention completely to something else for one minute. For instance, between recalls of a math chunk, study an English assignment. If you can recall the chunk perfectly after a minute, you have it in your memory and then only need to stretch the time between recalls of it. If you don't recall it, just refresh your understanding again and do the one-minute (or a prior) interval again. Turning your attention completely to something else between recalls is essential, since you deepen your memory only by challenging it.
Experimenting with this process, I found by trial and error that perfect recall at any time interval deepens the memory trace by about three to five times the prior interval. Accordingly, after perfect recall at one minute, your next intervals are 3-5 minutes, 12-15 minutes, 45-60 minutes, and 3 hours or end of day. (Students may vary a little in the best intervals for them personally as well as the size of their chunks.) Around the 15-minute mark, however, they'll notice a shift in their confidence: "Hey, I'm actually remembering this!" For lifetime learning you can continue to expand the recall interval by 3-5 times for days and weeks, depending on how deeply you wish to engrave the content in your mind. Entering a professional career, for instance, your standard will be different than for graduating from high school.
For the method to work, it's important to distinguish recall from review. The method depends solely on recall. Review may refresh our recognition and understanding, but its counter-productive effect is that the perfect memory trace is never deepened. With review, we always "start over" in a sense. Also, we usually review material in order to comply with an upcoming test or demand, so that we depend on something besides our own mastery. Besides sheer competence with subject matter, two other incentives for using the method are, first, students' amazement and pleasure at discovering that they can master something perfectly. Also, their effort to form capsules typically improves their grasp of capsule content.
For mastering material yourself, a spring-driven kitchen timer helps. Re-set it quickly for the upcoming recall interval, and turn your attention completely away from your chunk's content. The timer will keep you on track. In a class period, you can start off up to three chunks in succession. Ask a different student as timer for each. They tell the class when their chunk needs a recall.
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