What guides your day-to-day decisions? We all strive to act with fairness and honesty with our close ones, and with our work. But how often do our personal values align with those of the company we work for?
For many of us here at MemoryLab, we have the privilege and delight of knowing that they do. The same principle that guides our personal decisions also guides our company: Scientific integrity.
This is a commitment, and like any commitment comes with costs – often literal financial costs – but pays off with meaningful work that we can truly trust. In education, the decisions we make directly affect the lives of learners. They have to be decisions that can be trusted.
For example: Implementing “streaks” would bring users back to our app daily. However, whether this has educational impact in most learning contexts remains unknown, and may be unnecessary (and inefficient) for many learners.
It is imperative that companies in this field prioritise integrity over convenience. We have found that when you do, it can have a profound impact on your work, your team and the spirit of your organisation.
Great Trust, Great Responsibility
Officially, being a science-led company means committing to the Dutch Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. It provides a series of principles and standards for research that ensure that science is conducted well and responsibly. Their principles, which guide our decisions, are:
- Honesty
- Scrupulousness
- Transparency
- Independence
- Responsibility
Bound by these, we have a moral responsibility to bring the best learning and educational research to the broader public. We must be genuinely transparent and honest about what our research is, and how we are building on it – in stark contrast to many companies that conduct internal user testing, but do not make these results public as they may not be completely marketable. By holding ourselves to higher standards than the market requires, we hope to improve the industry and show that science and evidence can drive sustainable progress.
…at a Cost
Science and research do not directly result in revenue. Research projects take a lot of time, require real expertise and do not always lead to commercially interesting results. We do not only shout our best test scores from the rooftops, but present results with nuance – which is an opportunity cost in marketing. We have to be sure that everything we promise teachers and students is correct and backed by evidence.
For example: Many platforms aim to maximise the time users spend in their app. Time-in-app has been shown to increase app usage, but not necessarily improve learning outcomes. Indeed, lengthy learning sessions can be boring, frustrating and only marginally more impactful than a shorter learning session. Read more about “overlearning” here.
At MemoryLab, we’re having sharp debates about such topics. There are often many additional factors that we, as a science-led company, want to take into account when making decisions. This takes time. It’s really the long-game where we believe in building a solid foundation, and delivering a product that we can stand behind.
Attracted to Shared Values
“I’d like to work somewhere like SlimStampen” is the first thing I said to the internship coordinator of my university program back in 2022. I admired this exact commitment to scientific integrity, and I wanted to be part of it. What I found was that everyone is also intrinsically motivated by these standards and feels that the company is aligned with their morals. MemoryLab is able to motivate an amazing group of likeminded individuals who feel that what we are doing is right, which gives meaning to our work.
Moreover, there’s a community of independent researchers that are able to gauge the thoroughness of our research, and a community of learners that actually know about our science, which is so rewarding! Working with this community, and studying their learning data, allows us to “give back to science” and provide the research community with data on the basis of which new memory theories can be developed. Scientific integrity is a beacon that draws the attention of some amazing people from all over the world.
By committing to the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity, MemoryLab also has a duty of care to “provide a working environment that promotes and safeguards good research practices. They ensure that researchers can work in a safe, inclusive and open environment where they feel responsible and accountable, can share concerns about dilemmas and can discuss errors made without fearing the consequences.”
It’s a wonderful place to work, and commitment to these values is a huge part of that.
A Spirit of Discovery
Science often leads to unexpected results. We often meet with researchers and educators to discuss what is best from a scientific perspective. These discussions often do not have definite answers, and take a lot of time – but can spark great insight! These insights can reveal very unique avenues of exploration, and are endlessly interesting.
Prioritising integrity makes all our work a little atypical: Because we compromise little, we have our way of doing things. Our marketing must be transparent – To present all that is us to the world. This is a far more difficult challenge, because it’s not in the standard marketing playbook. The same goes for sales, partnerships, trade shows. Even development is always just a little different because of this. We don’t only listen to the customer and build what they want, but further: what actually works for their learners and is proven to create better learning.
It’s sometimes a little more work to figure everything out ‘our way’, but it’s also fun. It’s working to prove that science can improve education, and that it can be commercially viable!
