Overlearning refers to practicing newly acquired skills beyond the point of initial mastery. The term is also often used to refer to the pedagogical theory that this form of practice leads to automaticity or other beneficial consequences.
Overlearning refers to practicing newly acquired skills beyond the point of initial mastery. The term is also often used to refer to the pedagogical theory that this form of practice leads to automaticity or other beneficial consequences.
== Early studies == thumb|Data from Ebbinghaus showing recall falling over time Memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus performed classical overlearning studies in the late 1890s. He noticed that memory for learned material decreased over time, following the line of a "forgetting curve". Ebbinghaus recognized that lists of nonsense syllables became more difficult to recall over time, and some lists required more review time to regain 100% recall. He defined overlearning as the number of repetitions of material after which it can be recalled with 100% accuracy.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).