What Do You Know: Why Do People Forget What They Learn?

There are widespread ideas in organizational learning about how people forget at a specific rate, depending on how they learned the information. You may have seen something like this: We remember 10 percent of what we read, 20 percent of what we hear, 30 percent of what we see and hear, and so on. And you may have seen references to Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, which describes the nature of forgetting as exponential (Figure 1). He plotted forgetting on a graph and showed that without rei