The Zeigarnik effect describes a phenomenon where once we complete a task, we tend to forget about it. Related to this, is the idea that unfinished tasks tend to stay on our mind. It is similar to having a to-do list and then forgetting the items as you check them off. 

The implications for this in education are interesting since we tend to have start and stop times for classes, units, and school years. We have seen the ‘summer brain drain’ where students who learned content in one grade struggle to recall it two months later. I would be interested to know if the Zeigarnik effect is in play when students feel the year is over so they start to forget about what they have learned. Similarly, it may be an argument against modular or unit-based information since if it’s done and filed away, retention is unlikely. 

It may also be related to the idea of the ‘pump and dump’ for exam prep where students cram to learn the material but once they have used the information to pass the exam, they no longer have a use for it and forget much of it. If this is the case, then this may be a reason why interleaving or frequent small scale testing has been shown to be a successful educational strategy since in this case the work is never ‘done’ so we cannot simply file it away as completed. Based on this phenomenon, keeping the information alive and relevant becomes an important learning strategy.

In addition, Dean Burnett, in The Emotional Brain describes how we struggle to recall abstract information due to a lack of emotional element. Without the emotions and associated feelings attached to the information we don’t really retain it  quite as well. These emotions can be positive or negative but they need to be connected to the information to establish an emotional connection to it. Ideally, we want learning to be a fun and joyful experience, but beyond it being simply pleasant, could it be that the addition of these elements actually helps us to encode and retain the information better?

The combination of these two effects is one of the reasons I think it is so important to ensure that students have a positive experience with school, especially when it comes to starting and finishing the year. It is unlikely that students who struggle to attend school will remember much of the content that we try to teach them, when they go home at the end of the day their mind is likely to suggest they are done for the day and information they tried to learn that day can be lost. Similarly, with no emotional attachment to help connect them, it becomes harder to retain that information.

However, if we can create a positive environment where students want to be and want to continue learning, we leverage both the emotional connection to school, as well as keeping learning an unfinished task in that they want to come back to continue it. Using strategies in class as mentioned above, combined with lessons that connect both to previous lessons as well as set up for future lessons can be powerful strategies to switch their thinking that learning happens in discrete chunks but rather happens on a continuous basis.