The goal for every student is to reduce time spent on learning but without diminishing the results.
The researchers are intrigued by the primary factor, why do some students have better grades than others? IQ is not the answer.
Does more time spent on learning provide better results?
The amount of time spent on learning could be the answer because, statistically speaking, on average, students with better grades spent more time studying. However, that is not entirely true because some students spent less time than average and still have high grades, and vice versa.
It looks like the main differentiator between students is the time spent on repeating/reviewing learned lessons. The successful ones spend over 80% of their total learning time on repeating/reviewing lessons. The researchers draw a direct correlation between total studying time and repeating/reviewing time. And it was evident that more repeating/reviewing time means better knowledge of the subject. But, the time spent on repeating/reviewing is high, and only those dedicated to having the best grades are willing to spend so much time on repeating/reviewing.
Can we reduce the repeating/reviewing time without sacrificing quality?
Firstly, we found many more agile and more effective repeating/reviewing techniques, such as mind maps, flashcards, memory palace, etc. And those are helping practices, and every student should learn and use some of them. Although the primary concern stays, why do we need to spend so much time repeating/reviewing? The answer is simple because of memory retention, the mechanism of our brain. And this is a very well-known mechanism.
Forgetting curve
In the 19th century, the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus explored the exponential nature of forgetting, and he came up with a formula that explains the forgetting curve. According to his research, the human brain forgets what is learned over time and needs to review what is acquired to recover knowledge and reduce forgetting.
What does that mean for a student's amount of time spent on repeating/reviewing lessons?
According to Hermann's research, we can reduce the number of repeating/reviewing without losing the knowledge by predicting the approximate time when we should repeat/review learned. It is not so simple to calculate the time for the next repeating, so almost no one uses it in practice, even though it is proven to be very accurate.
Smart Timing app saves the day!
In order to calculate the next repeating time for students, we created an expert system that predicts the time for each repeating/reviewing.
Our app uses the time when the lesson is learned and then calculates the first repeating time. After each repeat, the expert system asks how well that repeating was, and according to this information and the date of repeating, it calculates the next repeating time.
Using the Smart Timing app, the amount of time spent on repeating/reviewing can be 50% less than without the app.
Let us put that in the numbers. If the student spent 100 hours learning and repeating, and if the repeating part is 80%, it is usually for high-grade students, which means the student spent 80 hours repeating/reviewing. Using the Smart Timing app, the student can reduce total learning time by 40 hours, which means that total time spent studying will drop from 100 to 60 hours without losing quality.
There is no other studying technique or repeating/reviewing strategy that can reduce the repeating time by so many hours.