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Teachers’ instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such knowledge often serves us well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on?  \nCognitive science is an interdisciplinary􀀛eld of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this regular American Educator column, we consider 􀀛ndings from this 􀀛eld that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application.  \nDaniel T. Willingham is a professor of cognitive psychology atthe University of Virginia. He is the author of When Can You Trust the Experts? How to Tell Good Science from Badin Education and Why Don’t Students Like School? His mostrecent book is Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do. For his articles on education, [go to www.danielwillingham.com](go to www.danielwillingham.com). Readers can post questions to “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” by sending an email [to ae@aft.org. Future columns will](to ae@aft.org. Future columns will) try to address readers’ questions.  \nBy Daniel T. Willingham  \nQuestion: Part of me feels funny asking students to memorize content knowledge because I know they are going to forget a lot of it. (After all, I know I have forgotten a lot ofwhat I learned in middle school.) What does the research say about memorizing things for school that you’re just going to forget later?  \nAnswer: We certainly forget things over time, and there’s no reason to expect that what students learn in school should be any exception. But take heart: we don’t forget everything, and under some conditions, we remember nearly everything. Researchers have some understanding of why we’re likely to overestimate what we’ve forgotten. And most important, there is some evidence that the memory of what we’ve learned in school matters—and actually makes us smarter.  \nILLUSTRAT IONS BY JAMES YANG  \nAMERICAN EDUCATOR | FALL 2015 33  \n“Ewhat oisneqas learntation iesn scriouloyt.”tributed to Albert  \nducation is what remains after one has forgotten  \nEinstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harvard President James Bryant Conant, psychologist B. F. Skinner, and many others. (In fact, its origins are obscure.)1 e quotation is typically invoked in one of two contexts. Either the author means to suggest that schools do not teach things that really matter in life, or, on the contrary, that schools do educate, even though we forget most of the details we’re asked to learn.  \nSeldom questioned is the assertion that what’s learned in school is forgotten. Perhaps it seems self-evident. Many of us have come across a decades-old test paper and been shocked to see that, at one time, we could name Brazil’s most important exports or prove that two angles are complementary.  \nThe contention that we forget most of our education is wrong. Under some conditions, weremember nearly everything.  \nNevertheless, the contention that we forget most ofour education is wrong. Naturally, lessons learned in school are subject to forgetting, like any other experience, but some of what we learn stays with us. Let’s look atthe conditions that contribute to retaining or losing school lessons. en we’ll examine the reasons we might overestimate forgetting.  \nWhat Do We Remember from School?  \ne year-end cumulative examination used in many classrooms suggests a natural experiment; what if students took the same exam a second time, say, a year later? Many experiments have relied on this basic structure, with the second exam composed of di􀀜erent questions than the 􀀞rst but testing the same concepts. e upshot? ere’s less forgetting than you might think.  \nLearning loss is usually expressed as a percentage of original performance; for example, students averaging 80 percent correct on test on","cbCaijbVqYtylzTE","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaijbVqYtylzTE","pdf",199150,"English","# Ask the Cognitive Scientist\n## What Do We Remember from School?\n## Learning Loss and Recognition vs. Recall\n## Effects of Time Delay","[{\"question\":\"Why is learning loss different for recall tests versus multiple-choice recognition tests?\",\"answer\":\"Evidence summarized in the article shows that recognition tasks typically produce smaller average learning loss than recall tasks, likely because recognizing the correct answer is easier than generating it from memory.\"}]","ASK THE COGNITIVE SCIENTIST - Do Students Remember What They Learn in School? | PDF",15]