For me personally, I struggle to remember much of conversations I’ve had, places I’ve visited or content I’ve read.
It’s one of the reasons why I find little value in travelling abroad for holidays. Not being able to remember much when compared to the cost associated, makes the whole experience less worth it for me from a financial perspective.
My ability to retain information is extremely poor and so I need to figure out a way to improve my retention rate.
The Learning Pyramid 🎓
There is a representation for retention for different types of learning called the learning pyramid. Which I ironically learned from someone else ‘teaching’ it to me.
The learning pyramid is a group of popular learning models and representations relating different degrees of retention induced from various type of learning.
| Retention rate | Learning activity before test of knowledge |
|---|---|
| 90% | Teach someone else/use immediately. |
| 75% | Practice what one learned. |
| 50% | Engaged in a group discussion. |
| 30% | Watch a demonstration. |
| 20% | Watch audiovisual. |
| 10% | Reading. |
| 5% | Listening to a lecture. |
According to the learning pyramid, if I just read or listen to a lecture, the retention rate for that knowledge is low. However, if I were to practice what I’ve learned or teach someone else, then my retention rate would be substantially higher.
Improving My Retention Rate 📈
While I don’t actively teach anyone, I can think of some ways to practice what I’ve learned (depending on the topic). Alternatively, I think writing notes on what I’ve learned, can at least allow me to re-read key points and hopefully absorb the knowledge better.
As I learn something either from a book, from someone at work or an article on the internet, it’s probably a good idea to write notes somewhere I visit regularly so I can re-read it. I used to write in a journal, both physical and on the computer, but I never read from there regularly enough. So I think I’ll try adding these notes on this blog instead.
Writing in my own words can be a way to improve my understanding of the topic. Also leaving the notes somewhere I can access and shared publicly can maybe be a form of ‘teaching’ as well.
Although, I suspect some of the notes will be written based on content I’ve read somewhere else, so depending on the content, I may or may not write it in my own words.
It will likely be written in similar way to taking notes when watching a lecture or powerpoint presentation unlike previous blog posts where they’re written in a perspective where I’m sharing my opinion on a topic.
Summary 📝
For me, I’ve been reading more and also stumbling across articles on the internet that has great nuggets of information and not being able to remember much of it is the issue.
Writing more is only one way for me to address this and leaving them somewhere I can easily read and share in the form of blog posts is the plan, thankfully I’ve taken a liking to writing lately.
In many ways, I’m already resolving this issue by adding blog entries. However, they’re often based on topics I wish to share, so I do some degree of research and thinking before I create those posts.
For this however, writing notes as and when I learn something of value is where I think is slightly different. And so I think I’ll prefix these particular posts with “Programmer Notes: <title>“ i.e. “Programmer Notes: Software Construction”
I don’t expect anyone to read these but myself, it will primarily be used as a place for me to refer or to stumble across it if I ever browse through my blog. But the end goal is the continued learning and hopefully a strong retention rate off the back of it.