A University of Denver professor has found that students forget half of the information taught to them within 13 weeks.

Donald Bacon, a marketing professor at the Daniels College of Business, conducted this study on student retention rates over a period of four years. There were 374 students who participated in the initial test, and of those students, 92 took a shorter version of the same test anywhere from a few weeks to as much as two years later.

“I was surprised at how quickly students forget what they learn although I always knew the retention wasn’t that great,” said Bacon.

He found that following the initial learning of the material, half of the information is forgotten within 13 weeks and continues to decrease over time. Technical details tend to slip away faster than writing skills.

The results of this study were published in the Journal of Marketing Education, which is very selective and only accepts 15 to 20 percent of research projects. Following this study, Bacon has changed the ways in which he teaches his material.

He requires students to take a final exam which is cumulative of all the material from the semester. Cumulative tests have been associated with a longer retention rate.

“In fact, the marketing department adopted a policy where all courses will have a comprehensive final assessment of some sort,” said Bacon.

He has been discussing with other marketing professors ways in which to improve retention by repeating material. “We’re thinking about ways that we can introduce and repeat the same material but in different forms, in different classes,” said Bacon.

Bacon has been a professor at DU since 1989 after receiving his doctorate in philosophy of business administration at the University of Michigan. Prior to becoming an educator, Bacon worked in finance and engineering.

He is currently working on a research project with three other DU professors on writing ability. This data will be collected over two years and approximately 500 students will be part of the sample.

A future research project for Bacon will concern measuring the importance of attributes. This project will get started after the completion of the study on writing ability. He uses students for most of his research but does admit that “sometimes students are too smart because they are very good at taking tests.”

His future projects will use students and other non-students in order to obtain a more representative sample of the general population.

The article regarding the retention rate of students can be found in volume 28 of the Journal of Marketing Education. This article was named “article of the year” in 2006.