Shouldn't our curricula be personalised to our neuroplasticity?

Summary: I share with you a project I've been thinking about for years. The mapping of content to personalised memory retention. I believe we finally have the right conditions to be able to design curricula around our brains and not just the development of concepts within an academic field. I've amended Ebbinghaus ' forgetting curve formula to account for some of my own variables. And have tried to explain this as succinctly as I can.

How bad is your memory?

An answer no doubt comes quickly to your mind. But let me ask you a question that probably should have come first. What is memory? A 30-sec google and voilà

'the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers(the ability to bring to one's mind an awareness of) information.'

A wildly substandard definition of a complicated phenomenon. You see memory can be subdivided substantially to better understand what it is we mean. There's working, short, long etc. But what most people think of memory is usually what we refer to as long-term memory.

In my experience teaching, I hypothesised that memory is the most influential factor to determine if a student will excel in my mathematics class or not. This has got your head nodding with enthusiasm, sent you seething into the other room, or simply passed by with no magnitude. But I felt so strongly about this I endeavoured upon an MSc in Education to put my money where my mouth is...unfortunately that money has yet to yield anything worthy for my mouth to say. However you feel about my conviction in such a nuanced area, I should hope that we can at least agree that memory is pretty damn important. So can't we use it to choose our content coverage?

I believe we have the technology and cognitive knowledge to design curricula based on our students' neuroplasticity. To limit the content to exactly what they are able to fully embed and reproduce. And that in doing so we will optimise the time they will commit to their studies. This optimisation can be achieved as soon as students are able to determine the stability of their memory through testing; administered in a psychologically safe learning environment by an educator trained in the interpretation of these metrics. Or if the students are independent enough, by themselves. Just like a rapid antigen test (Let's hope that reference becomes outdated as soon as possible!).

By using modern neuroscience and large data sets in order to refine the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve we can represent a students memory ability. Caveat: I am merely an armchair neuro enthusiast and have applied my mathematical understanding to the neuroscience articles I read. I implore you to pick apart my mathematical choices and the inbuilt hypotheses that glare out at you from the screen.

Essentially, our formula will be able to tell you exactly when you should revise a topic based on your personal memory retention. The beauty resides in the fact that each retrieval will allow you a longer amount of time before forgetting the material. There will likely be a limit to this that will be dependent upon each individual's neuroplasticity and the parameters of the human brain. The first determinant then is how do we measure an individual's long-term memory retention in a timely manner? This is the first liberty I'll take. I hypothesise that our short term memory ability will in general correlate to our long term memory ability. In which case we will use your short term memory as the indicator for your memory stability Fancy giving this a go?

Take 2 minutes to memorise the following:

Now spend 2 minutes writing down all the words you can remember. If you scored 3 or less give yourself a 0.5, 17 or less you scored a 1, and more than 17 you get a 2. This is your Memory Stability Score (This has many needed improvements. Not least a large data set to actually determine a normal distribution with which to rigourize the scoring boundaries)

Now that we have your memory stability score we can go ahead and plug this into our formula to determine the best intervals for you to study in. WARNING: those of you who may have had a bad experience in math may not like the next part. Don't worry too much about the math exactly and feel free to skip to the implications.

For those who are comfortable with the math, please give me feedback and suggestions!

R = Retrievability, e = exponential function, t = time (days), c = interval constant (translations that allow for determining which days to revise), r = repetition scalar (a recurrence relation similar to Fibonacci sequence), S = Stability of Memory (currently determined by short term memory test), ?Phi = 1.618...?(chosen due to my Master's hypothesis...a whole other article if you're interested in this?)

Anyway, now that the math is done. Let's assume you scored a stability of 1. This is what your sequence will look like:

Aha! I tricked you. Math is everywhere!! No, but seriously this is for the math inclined to critique. What this actually looks like is:

Stay with me, this one isn't so complicated. The 1 on the vertical shows 100% of the content you learn. The curve shows how much you forget over time. In this case, we're going up in days. So:

The circled points are where I suggest you revise i.e. after one day, then on the third day, then on the sixth day etc. Theoretically, you should be able to retrieve what you have learned after a year of not having looked at the content if you revise days 1, 3, 6, 11, 19, 32, 53, 87, 142, and 231 (I suspect this might reach our neural capacity as humans...but then again we do remember events for decades)

I'll be the first to admit that this is the absolute beginning of a research study. I mean it's literally just a thought process at this point. And so the imagined implications of this project far exceed the likely practical outcomes. But it's hard not to get excited by the impact we could have if we tailored content to be spiralled in a way that matched our personalised memory ability. Especially since the tech absolutely exists to put this into practice. We need only apply our ideas to more substantial neuroscience research in order to realise how much truth may lie in this ambition.

This is my current obsession and so I would be ecstatic to engage in any and all conversation surrounding this topic. Both with the concept in general and the nitty-gritty mathematics of it too. Please do reach out, even if you would just like to be taught the mathematics used in this article. A return to the old math teacher days would certainly bring a happy reminiscence with it!

References:

1. Desmos Graphing Calculator (Honestly get the app on your phone, it's amazing!)
2. Google Docs Equation Editor

About the Author.?Phil works as a consultant for Education Perfect and is always looking to collaborate on educational projects that push for systemic change. Follow Phil on?Twitter ?or right here on?Linkedin .