LearnSmart is designed to maximize productivity and efficiency in learning. Every minute a student spends in LearnSmart will be the most high impact (productive) minute possible. Every high impact minute will be different for every student, as it is based on his/her needs at a given point in time.

If a student has not yet covered the most important learning objectives in a module, a high impact minute would put higher priority on initial exposure to those topics. Translation – All learning objectives are not created equal. They range from: Absolutely Must Know -----> Nice To Know. If LearnSmart has never exposed you to the "Absolutely Must Know" topics, it will prioritize your time to make an initial pass through those.

Repetition plays an important role in learning. Many students recognize this, but none know precisely how much repetition is needed, let alone the optimal time to space out this repetition. LearnSmart does. LearnSmart will repeatedly expose a student to learning objectives when there is the greatest likelihood of being able to advance the knowledge from working memory to short-term memory, or from short-term memory to long-term memory. LearnSmart can do things like predict which topics students are going to forget and when they are most likely to forget them, using a variety of memory decay models to do this individually for each learner. LearnSmart uses this information to prioritize the student's work to recharge on those items that he/she will benefit the most from at a given point in time. In this case, "benefit" means moving things closer to long-term memory so that they can be retrieved under stress (a.k.a. exams) and/or for application-level activities.

Equally important as what to spend time on is what NOT to spend time on. LearnSmart requires the students to deliberately practice only those learning objectives that have the highest impact, while de–prioritizing those that will have little impact because the student is either not ready for them at a given moment in time – or because the student has already mastered them. Students waste time by studying content that they have already mastered, and also by not spacing their learning out optimally. LearnSmart focuses the student on those things that he/she needs the most – those things which will have the greatest impact on mastery (and exam scores!). Additionally, LearnSmart intelligently uses the time a student is spending by exposing students to content at intervals that are scientifically proven to maximize learning. This means that at any given point in time, there are lots of things a student should not be spending his/her time on, and LearnSmart ensures that they are not wasting their precious time on those things.