Understanding and remembering information may seem like a straightforward concept, but it is actually a complex process that involves multiple aspects of cognition. The phenomena of knowledge retention and knowledge loss are especially important for instructional designers, managers, and educators. Designing learning experiences that will promote the ability to effectively understand, remember, and apply information is key to successful training.
So, what is knowledge retention really? In this post, you’ll learn the following:
To put it simply, you “know” something when you can recall it at a relevant and useful moment. This signals that you have:
Let’s put this into context. Say it is your first day at a new job which includes new hire onboarding with a human resources professional sharing all the information about your insurance, PTO policy, tech log-in information, and so on. This is likely an overwhelming time when you take in a lot of information. Now, imagine that months later, you go to submit a PTO request but can’t remember the process for doing so. Even though you understood the PTO submission process when it was explained to you and thought it was simple, you can’t remember the information and need to look back at the document shared with you on your first day that outlines the process. This is because information learned and understood doesn’t necessarily get retained or memorized.
In order to count as knowledge retention, learners would need to move that information from short-term memory (where you recall new information a day or week later) and into long-term memory (where you recall it months or years later). Learners who find information important, regularly apply it to their lives, and make novel associations between multiple pieces of information will experience better knowledge retention.
What is the knowledge retention process? Cognitively, the process looks something like this:
When the human memory system works effectively, it creates an ever-growing web of connected information. These connections provide the key for application and open up opportunities to continue adding to existing knowledge. The average person’s memory has almost endless potential for knowledge retention.
Exposure to an idea is not the same as understanding the concept or submitting it to memory. This is important because learners are often expected to “know” something when they’ve merely been exposed to it in passing.
So, what is knowledge retention in the workplace? An understanding of this concept provides a central pillar to building training materials and microlearning opportunities that work. Essentially, an understanding of knowledge retention and the cognitive processes that make it happen provide instructional designers, managers, and educators the context they need to build successful learning environments.
Failure to understand the complexity of knowledge retention can lead to superficial learning experiences that leave learners disengaged and without the understanding they need. Furthermore, poorly designed training environments can lead to frustration for the entire workforce. Employees feel frustrated that they don’t have the knowledge they need to succeed. Simultaneously, supervisors feel frustrated that expectations are not being met.
Training without attention to knowledge retention is often a waste of time and energy.
One thing that makes effective training challenging is that knowledge retention is unique to each individual learner. Every learner comes into a learning environment with their own neurological operating system. What best activates attention (and minimizes distraction) will vary from person to person. Furthermore, prior experience and existing knowledge mean that some learners will be able to quickly encode a piece of new information, while others will need more exposure or even additional foundational knowledge before new information is retained.
All of this diversity in processing means that effective learning environments should build in opportunities to check for knowledge retention. These checks need to be more than superficial multiple-choice quizzes. Instead, checks should challenge learners to use knowledge in novel ways that require recall, analysis, and real-world application.
Instructional designers, managers, and educators need to understand what hinders knowledge retention just as well as they understand what promotes it.
The primary challenge to knowledge retention is forgetting. As a team of researchers wrote in “Improving Students’ Long-Term Knowledge Retention Through Personalized Review”:
“Forgetting is ubiquitous. Regardless of the nature of the skills or material being taught, regardless of the age or background of the learner, forgetting happens.”
This process of inevitable knowledge loss is called the “forgetting curve” and it happens to everyone. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus coined this term, and his findings have long been an alarming reality for educators and trainers. Ebbinghaus posited that learners immediately begin forgetting material from the moment they’ve learned it. Then, as the days and weeks pass, more and more knowledge loss occurs. On average, learners forget 90% of new knowledge within a month.
In some ways, education itself is just a race against forgetting. Common barriers to knowledge retention include:
A solid knowledge retention strategy is to empower learners to not just gain exposure to concepts but to review them repeatedly and practice them in a real-world context until they’ve successfully encoded them cognitively. At this point, recall and application are frequent, and the information becomes a foundational element for novel extensions. In other words, your employees will have the ability to use the knowledge they’ve gained in new ways to solve problems and create new neural connections.
Use these knowledge retention principles to optimize your learning environment:
A dedicated learning management system (LMS) allows instructional designers, managers, and educators to deliver a wide variety of information in a way that meets these principles. A robust, interactive LMS will enable you to build engaging learning experiences that take place in a spaced, managed timeline. This allows training to take place with repetition in small chunks that maximizes knowledge retention and builds learner confidence and application over time.
Designing effective learning experiences requires a thorough understanding of how learning works. Now that you have an answer to “What is knowledge retention?”, keep learning. Find out more about key concepts in learning by visiting our glossary of educational terminology.