One major impediment to learning is the “forgetting curve,” the fact that people rapidly forget what they learn without reinforcement (Smolen et al., 2016). Assessments are a good method of combating the forgetting curve as they call up past information and, in doing so, encode it more deeply in the brain—a process called retrieval practice. But they are more effective during the critical 24-hour window before the forgetting curve kicks into high gear and the student loses too much of the information to retrieve much of it (Radvansky et al., 2022).
