Software that harnesses principles of cognitive science aims to turn you into a grade-A student
YOU are walking down the street when your phone buzzes. "What is the capital of Maryland?" it asks you. You know the answer but you can't quite grasp it until all of a sudden you remember: "Annapolis". The question prompted your brain just in time.
That is the scenario envisaged by the makers of software Cerego, which launched last week. It uses a basic principle of cognitive science called "spaced repetition" 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't new, but Cerego aims to harness the idea to let people learn anytime, anywhere.
"The amount of information we need to retain is growing rapidly," says Cerego co-founder Andrew Smith Lewis. "Current solutions do a fine job of bringing information to the screen, but we're not seeing much on how we learn." Smith Lewis says Cerego's grand ambition is to "handle learning and relearning for the duration of the user's lifetime".
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've 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.
"It's all very plausible and reasonable. They know their literature," says Ryan Baker, an educational technology researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. "I haven't seen any commercial products that put together all these different things."
Cerego doesn't 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's scientific adviser, Jan Plass 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't run the spacing algorithm.
Another company, Carnegie Learning, 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 "procedural learning" is something the brain does anyway.
Carnegie's 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.
"There is this tremendous potential to optimise human learning," says Ken Koedinger, a co-founder of Carnegie Learning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Computational aids that target how we absorb information - like spaced repetition or procedural learning - 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.
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.
If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.
App for quizzing your way to being a mastermind
This article
App for quizzing your way to being a mastermind
can be opened in url
http://newsgrandific.blogspot.com/2012/12/app-for-quizzing-your-way-to-being.html
App for quizzing your way to being a mastermind
