The Memrise Prize

The Memrise Prize was a research competition run by Memrise with University College London to find the most effective way to learn foreign vocabulary. It launched in November 2014 with a $10,000 prize, led at UCL by Dr Rosalind Potts and Prof David Shanks and at Memrise by Ed Cooke.

It ran in two stages. Cognitive science labs each designed a method for learning eighty foreign words in an hour, tested it against a control in their own setting and submitted the data. Four finalists were then run head to head on a thousand Memrise learners, with a recall test a week later, and the winner was settled statistically.

The result was announced in March 2017. Radboud University won with a method built on memory palaces and adaptive practice, which more than doubled recall against ordinary repeated study. The full paper, by Potts, van den Broek and colleagues, appeared in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

Stef built the platform the competition ran on: the tool that combined the entrants' learning methods and tested them on real learners to see which worked best.