As school returns, parents and teachers might each be faced with the familiar chorus of "I can't find my school jumper" and ...

The forgetting curve describes how new information fades away. Once you’ve “learned” something new, the fastest drop occurs in just 20 minutes; after a day, the curve levels off.

You forget things over time. We all do. But if you need to retain information for a test or presentation, you can be the Forgetting Curve with spaced repetition and engaged learning.

This comes from 19th century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, whose "forgetting curve" showed how most people forget the details of new information quite rapidly, but this tapers off over time.

This phenomenon is not a new discovery. A German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus researched the processes of learning and forgetting in the 1880s and was the first to describe the forgetting curve.

The curve is a simple graphic demonstrating how information is lost over time, but it proved that time-related forgetting is real (and has been reaffirmed by further study since).