You are studying a foreign language and you must learn 30 words from yesterday’s class. How can you achieve this with the fewest number of tries and retain the words for the long run?

Perhaps you may learn the words in three sessions of 10 minutes each if you group them under pertinent categories, visualize their characteristics, invent mnemonics, link them to related concepts. But to memorize them in a hodgepodge order you may need 5 20-minute sessions – and later forget more. And overall, you may recall more words a year later if you rehearse after one month than if you rehearse them after one week.

Will the same learning methods work for the languages of the Pygmies as well as for French? the inhabitants of Nauru or the Canadian First Nations? High-income countries as well as developing countries?

They probably will. All humans belong to one species, so despite individual and cultural differences, we process information in the same general ways. Our memory is like a huge bottle with a very narrow neck. We can retain infinite amounts of information, but at any given moment we can process very little of it. This feature influences our thinking and the way our languages are made. So, languages and scripts appear to be very different across the earth, but in fact they conform to memory specifications.

The commonalities of human cognition can help make the education of the poor in low-income countries more efficient. Instructional methods that dovetail the ways people are set up to retain information may educate more students and save money and time.

The learning efficiency concept has received little attention thus far, partly because high-income countries have little need for it in the early grades. (Studies like Pashler et al. 2007 aim at higher knowledge levels.) In higher-income countries, curricula and timetables have some redundancy to allow for repeated learning opportunities, so even lower-performing children acquire basic skills. But in poor countries instructional time is often wasted, and students have little opportunity to catch up on something they miss. Trained teachers are scarce, and schools may be already used in three shifts. It becomes important therefore, to use methods that help students encode and retain as much as possible from every instructional hour.

Such methods must be identified, promoted, and put to use. Some hypotheses exist, but methods must be specified for efficiency. For example, how can poorer students be taught to recognize all letters in, say 15 days rather than 30? Systematic instruction of letter analogies probably speeds up retention, but by how much, compared to alternatives? How often should activities change to avoid attention span loss? It is known that certain movements consolidate memory, but which ones will facilitate retention of specific items? These issues seem immaterial where students have abundant opportunities to learn. But in countries where student lives and millions of dollars are at stake, such details may help move some students from early dropout to basic skills acquisition. To retain new items, we must know the prerequisites. Therefore to progress meaningfully to higher grades, efficiency in acquiring basic skills is a crucial topic.

Interestingly, learning efficiency is a concept that intersects with educational economics. Economists study the internal efficiency of school systems as portrayed by student flows: dropout, repetition, attainment rates. The unit of measurement is the student, but the underlying construct is learning efficiency. Perhaps, retention of information per unit of instructional time could be quantified. This would be more useful for the early grades when information is fairly concrete and essential. The uniformity of human cognition would facilitate generalizations.

But in an age where individual differences and cultural sensitivities are celebrated, emphasis on underlying uniformities may arouse philosophical questions. Individual attention to students would be highly desirable, but the schools of the poor give limited opportunities for this. What is the role of our cognitive commonalities vis a vis our cultural differences? Readers’ views would be greatly appreciated.

Learn More

• Changizi M.A. and S. Shimojo. 2005. Character complexity and redundancy in writing systems over human history. Proceedings of the Royal Society-Biology, ;272(1560):267-75.

• Culbertson, Jennifer, and Geraldine Legendre. 2010.  Investigating the evolution of agreement systems using an artificial language learning paradigm. In Proceedings of the 2010 Western Conference on Linguistics. Department of Linguistics, California State University, Fresno. (Artificial grammar reveals inborn language sense, study shows. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2011/05/110513112256.htm)

• Miestamo, Matti, Kaius Sinnemäki, Fred Karlsson (eds). 2008. Language Complexity: Typology, Contact, Change.  Language companion series 94. John Benjamins Publishing co.

• Pashler, H., Bain, P., Bottge, B., Graesser, A., Koedinger, K., McDaniel, M., and Metcalfe, J. (2007) Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning (NCER 2007-2004). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/practiceguides/20072004.pdf