For the past six or seven years I have started my class (almost) every day the same way…with retrieval practice. This is usually a quick review of information covered from the last class meeting or of information we’ve covered in past lessons that directly relate to what we will discussing today. Four or five multiple-choice questions, a short-answer question or two, labeling a diagram…the type of questions posed change from time to time, but the idea that students need to retrieve related information from their long-term memory to correctly complete the review never changes. And I’ve got five reasons why this works for me on an almost daily basis and why I think all teachers should incorporate this in their classroom, at least, occasionally.
1. It creates a predictable routine for students.
While most of my writing is laser focused on student learning, reason 1 really has nothing to do with the learning of the material presented during the review and everything to do with creating a predictable environment for learning. If you’ve taught for any amount of time, you know how valuable routines can be for students of all ability levels and you also know how the beginning of class can be a time of unknown for students. They may not know what to do or how to get started and that can lead to behavior that is detrimental to the class and to learning. But, if students know they are to come in and immediately begin on this review, a lot of the nonsense that may present itself is immediately squashed. This provides the teacher with time to check the class roster for absent students and do other administrative tasks and it really sets a tone for learning for the entire class period.
2. It demonstrates the benefits of retrieval practice.
The act of retrieving information (also called the testing effect) from memory has over a century of research pointing to its positive impact on learning. For an overview of the history of retrieval practice testing, click here. Tasking students with accessing their long-term memories to successfully answer a question or a prompt creates an advantageous setting for strengthening those memories. Other forms of study that are, unfortunately, usually favored for study (rereading notes and highlighting) do not require students to think as hard or use the material to-be learned at all and, thus, do not have the same positive benefits for learning. Like many aspects of performance (in and out of the classroom), the more we struggle with practice, the more prepared we probably are for the performance. Said another way, the more students are tasked with working more diligently with the content, the more prepared they will be for a final assessment. Something I often tell my students is that if we get to the final assessment for a unit and you have not had to think about and use the information, we are both probably going to fail. The retrieval practice to start class provides students with a daily opportunity to think about and use the material. And the more they practice with the information, the more likely they are to be able to retrieve it and appropriately use it when it matters most.
3. It demonstrates the benefits of spaced practice.
Spaced practice (or distributed practice) is another strategy for learning that has a plethora of research demonstrating its positive effects on learning. Spaced practice is basically the opposite of the ever-popular cramming. And, while cramming for a test may lead to some short-term gains in knowledge, those gains are usually lost long-term. Spacing out the retrieval practice of material is much more likely to produce more permanent changes in long-term memory. Again, students don’t seem to favor spacing out their practice and, instead, resort to the ‘I’m going to study for hours tonight for tomorrow’s test’. This can lead to frustration and stress on the student’s part and, as previously stated, doesn’t lead to the efficient and effective learning that we want our students to experience. By creating a setting where students hear about and work with information one day in class and then are tasked with accessing that same information the next day as a review, students have spaced out their retrieval by 24 hours. If students will then, again, access that same material again later with studying and perhaps access it a final time before the summative assessment, they have now retrieved that material three or four times. That is good stuff and is much more likely to create success on the summative assessment and beyond.
For more on how and when I introduce my students to the positive effects of spaced retrieval practice, please access this article: Learning Names and Modeling Spaced Retrieval Practice.
4. It forces students to face their overconfidence and demonstrates the normality of forgetting.
Something I see in my students occasionally is overconfidence in their learning. They assume that if they heard me talking about it one day and they understood it that day, they’ll have access to that material in their brain forever. But, that just isn’t so. Just because a student leaves class one day understanding information absolutely does not mean they will know it and be able to retrieve it even twenty four hours later. In fact, most of our forgetting occurs in the first day or two after we’ve experienced new material. So, these daily reviews of past material not only help to attenuate that forgetting that occurs with everyone, but it also makes students face the fact that they don’t remember everything they possibly thought they did. And while it is never fun for students to find out they don’t know something they thought they did, they would much rather find out during practice that they don’t know something than find out on game day (summative assessment). If they find out during the final performance…it’s too late.
And on forgetting…it. is . normal. Everyone forgets. Yet, sometimes I think especially in the classroom setting, students see forgetting as a strike against them as a person. Like, they are less than others because they forget…not realizing that everyone does. We need to reframe how we talk to students about forgetting. Let them know it is normal but also show them strategies (chiefly retrieval and spaced practice) that help to curtail the forgetting.
5. It creates healthier study habits.
A last reason I give these (almost) daily reviews is that it allows students to practice more efficient and effective studying. As stated above, most students don’t choose the best methods for studying. For a look at what they do seem to prefer, read this article. While we complete these daily examples of retrieval and spaced practice, I have conversations with them where I show the research and instruct them in why they want to use these methods. Again, they’re usually not as easy as just rereading your notes, but they increase the effectiveness of studying, so why not use them? Surely students aren’t studying to be inefficient and they don’t want to feel like they’re wasting their time. So, by regularly having students practice spaced retrieval practice, they learn it isn’t as intimidating or as hard to plan for as they might think. How can I expect them to understand why and how to study better if I don’t show them and have them practice? The answer is simple: they’re not going to.
So, while I certainly understand that everyone may not be able to implement retrieval practice at the beginning of (almost) every class, I hope these five reasons make you possibly pause and consider how more of this in your classroom can be incredibly advantageous for your students, no matter their age and/or ability level.
If you want to more about how and why I implement retrieval practice and spaced practice in my classroom, I would strongly recommend you preorder my upcoming book. Part I focuses on memory processing and constraints that can limit remembering. Part II focuses on the implementation of retrieval practice and spaced practice in my classroom.
In the US, preorder here. In the UK and elsewhere, preorder here.
Feature image by Towfiqu barbhuiya: https://www.pexels.com/photo/five-yellow-stars-on-blue-and-pink-background-9821386/