Study Plans · 5 min read · April 23, 2026
In 1885, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted a series of experiments on his own memory that produced one of the most important findings in the history of psychology: the forgetting curve. Ebbinghaus found that memory decays rapidly after initial learning — losing approximately 50 percent of newly learned information within 24 hours, and 70 to 80 percent within a week, without review.
The forgetting curve is not a curiosity of 19th-century psychology. It is a description of how human memory actually works, and it has direct implications for how FNP students should approach board preparation.
The forgetting curve means that the conventional approach to board preparation — reading a content area thoroughly once, then moving on — is fundamentally inefficient. By the time you have worked through the entire curriculum, you have forgotten most of what you learned at the beginning. The student who reads a review book from cover to cover and then starts practice questions is not reviewing material they know; they are re-learning material they have forgotten.
"The forgetting curve is not a problem to be solved. It is a feature of human memory to be worked with. The study strategies that work best are the ones designed around how memory actually decays and recovers." — Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, 1885
The most effective strategy for beating the forgetting curve is spaced repetition — reviewing material at intervals that are timed to catch the memory just before it would be forgotten. Each review resets the forgetting curve, and each successive review produces a slower rate of forgetting. After three to four spaced reviews, the memory becomes highly durable — resistant to the rapid decay that characterizes initial learning.
In practical terms, this means building a study schedule that returns to previously learned content at regular intervals. A simple approach: after completing a content area, schedule a review at 24 hours, one week, and two weeks. Each review should be active — practice questions, self-testing — not passive re-reading.