02/07/2026
People forget 80% of what they learned in the classroom and conference room! Here’s what we can do about it!
This is Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve. In 1880, he researched how long it took for people to forget.
He found that we forget 70% of what we’ve learned in just 24 hours.
In six days, that increases to forgetting 80%!
Now, you might think that this research is ancient and irrelevant. But…
In 2015, Murre and Dros replicated and analysed the Forgetting Curve again.
Their results were similar to Ebbinghaus’s.
So what does this mean for us English language teaching professionals?
Repetition is key for learning. To make things stick, we need to see them again.
In the classroom, this means we need to provide opportunities for learners to revise and develop skills in reviewing.
For our own professional development, we need to find ways to make the things we learn at conferences stick.
Enter drawing!
The Drawing Effect (Wammes, Meade, Fernandes, 2016) found that we are more likely to remember new words when we draw them.
Allan Paivio’s Dual-Coding theory also highlights that combining words with images helps us to remember.
Think of a time you showed students an image, and there was a collective ‘aaaah’ of understanding!
Or when you have a note book full of wordy scribbles, but the page you remember most has a doodle of a bird (or tree, or whatever).
From my own experience, since I started sketchnoting, I:
🧠pay more attention at learning events (e.g. classes, webinars, conferences)
💭can visualise key information from my sketchnotes a long time after I’ve created them
🔁enjoy reviewing (and reworking) my notes more
🎁help others understand and remember the information when I share my sketchnotes
I am not alone with this. I’ve met hundreds of people who say their lives have been transformed since they started sketchnoting.
That’s partly because sketchnoting and visual thinking are also great ways to reduce processing load and make learning more accessible, multisensory and fun.
Have images helped you remember anything? What other techniques do you use to boost memory?
If you’d like more on how visual thinking can help you and your learners to remember, check out my website. It’s full of blogs, webinar recordings, podcasts, course and resource packs.
Or PM me to discuss my bespoke training, visual recording (live digital or 'big paper wall' sketchnoting) and resource creation services.
