John Hopton for redOrbit.com – @Johnfinitum

For all that the human race has learned, the science of learning itself remains under-investigated. Educational psychology and neuroscience have discovered many of the factors that influence how humans retain information, yet we still don’t really know how best to combine these factors in order to maximize the effectiveness of memorization. So, scientists looked to the people for answers.

The Memrise Prize was a contest that asked people around the world to conduct experiments to find the easiest and most effective way to memorize new information. The hope is that the new winning methodology will lead to a revolution in methods of studying for exams, learning new languages, and more, as well as enabling us to better understand the human mind.

The finalist methodologies were recently chosen by researchers from University College London, a cognitive scientist from University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Memrise founder Ed Cooke, who told us more about the project.

“There is no real consensus, and it’s not even really a popular scientific question, how people actually learn fastest,” Cooke says. “Scientific studies usually focus on one aspect as a time, but nobody really asks what the best combination of all these effects is – do they amplify and complement each other?”

“We put together a contest with all the merits of scientific enquiry; namely properly controlled empirical studies, to come up with the best possible methodology for learning. We chose 80 foreign words to learn in an hour which learners would then be tested on in one week’s time.”

Impressive results

“We put it out there to the scientific community, and twenty cognitive science and psychology labs did experiments and pooled their knowledge. We had submissions from some of the top psychology labs in the world. The results were quite impressive, sometimes doubling the number of words a person can recall a week later.”

“The final stage is to build these methodologies and run a massive experiment on Memrise with tens of thousands and users trying out these different experiments. We’ll hopefully reveal some spectacularly important things about the way people learn. It will all be open-source, so it will benefit ed-tech start-ups, schools, and university systems. It will provide a clear body of shared knowledge.”

The methodologies build on and combine existing mnemonic techniques such as story-telling (relating the things to be remembered to a story), the memory palace method in which learners imagine the words and their meanings within an imagined room or other location which they can mentally “walk through,” and the “buffet technique,” in which learners choose which words to focus on when, and in what order.

Ed Cooke concluded that: “What excites me most about it is that there are a hundred practitioners and psychologists who have views on what the best way of learning is, but this is the first time different philosophies get to go head to head in truly empirical fashion with many thousands of people doing the experiment – so you get really high quality data.”

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