In the 1880s Hermann Ebbinghaus decided to investigate how people learn new information. He was interested in memory because they thought that if they could understand how human beings stored knowledge then they would be able to design better teaching methods. Ebbinghaus wanted to find out whether people remembered things more easily if they had seen them before or if they were told about them again and again. He used an experiment called the “serial position effect” where he asked volunteers to remember lists of items. These lists included words, numbers, shapes, pictures, sounds, smells, tastes, actions, and objects. When he presented these lists to the test subjects, he found that they could remember the items better if they were presented at the beginning of the list.
Ebbinghaus‘s experiments recognized the two distinct processes of memorization and recall. The recall was used as a measure of learning effectiveness. In this way, they could compare the results of different schedules of memorizing and the effects of time on their ability to recall information. They found there were distinct patterns in how people remembered things, and that there was also a strong pattern to how quickly people forgot them.
