How can we use our limited amount of classroom time and make learning stick?

By Marc Roberts

The most powerful and effective strategy for improving learning is retrieval practice. Of course, this isn't some new and revolutionary concept in the world of education, and teachers have long been 'revisiting' old material. Back in the day, it was called revision: where students would turn up on a Wednesday afternoon to be re-taught a random topic in exactly the same way as before, on the basis that "I haven't done this with them for a while". The hope was that by teaching it a second time, it would be far more likely to stick. If you can shoehorn this revision into days, hours, or even minutes before an exam, then all the better. We have all seen, heard, or even participated in lessons where an assessment lesson starts with 'a-bit-of-revision' whereby chance happens to cover the exact material on the assessment. The outcome? Well, the outcome is obvious. And what have students gained from it? In all likelihood, very little.

So, let's take this idea of revision and make it less random. Any statistician will tell you that 'random is never random' anyway, and we will ultimately end up covering topics that we prefer to teach, or that require less preparation, or that we think the students need to brush up on. Instead, let’s make it more… I can't think of the word, so let's call it 'un-random'. Let's map it out on some fancy document or even better: a spreadsheet. Why not even go the whole hog and incorporate it into our schemes of learning? If we carry it out in planned intervals, on several occasions, surely that increases the chance of it sticking? Now, what if instead of doing this with just the weakest students, or those forced to come into school early on a Tuesday morning for 'extra-maths', what if we carried it out to all students. In fact, nobody wants to come into school earlier than they need to, so how about (and bear with me on this one) we build this "revision time" into lessons? Thoughts?

I've spoken to some leading marketing firms and have decided to go with the branding of ‘Planned, Spaced Knowledge Retrieval Practice’, which annoyingly has an acronym that is completely unreadable.

Anyone who has read or knows of Rosenshine's ‘Ten Principles of Instruction’ will know that number ten is the principle of a "weekly and monthly" review. Now, normally, when a person is asked to come up with ten key principles, they are struggling by the time they get to number ten, however, it seems in this case that the "best was saved for last". We can use as many scaffolding and modelling techniques as we like and we can ask the most effective questions we can think of to check understanding, but if we simply 'box off' and forget about the work at the end of the unit, or worse still, at the end of the lesson, then the chances are that this learning will immediately start to decay.

Learning needs frequent revisiting in a variety of ways so that students, not only, hold onto this knowledge but start to connect it with other ideas. What’s more, it is paramount that any new material is revisited within the first year. Take the example of pancake day: every year we make pancakes but, for most of us, we make them once a year and once a year only. So, when it comes to that day, we still need to dust off a recipe book or search the internet for the same old recipe that we use every year. And why? Because we haven't accessed this information for twelve months (or even more as for some reason, that nobody knows, Pancake Day is not a fixed day in the calendar year!). Yet ask us to recount the registration number of our first car from 20 years ago and there is no problem as this information was accessed regularly within the first twelve months after we learnt it for the first time; despite its relatively useless nature, this is now part of our long-term memory whether we like it or not.

It is crucial that following the initial teaching of new content, this knowledge is accessed and re-accessed several times over the subsequent weeks, months, and even years. Whilst this seems an onerous task, accessing knowledge regularly will ensure that it, not only, becomes part of our long-term memory but that each time, this knowledge will deepen. It is also true that regularly spending a short amount of time reflecting on our learning is a far more efficient use of time than repeating or re-teaching it in 12 months.

The time at which we carry out our ‘Planned, Spaced Knowledge Retrieval Practice’ must therefore be scheduled. It is not enough to rely on the teachers of our subject to revisit prior knowledge as and when they think about it. Whilst, as teachers, we are often good at making natural links between different areas of our curriculum, what about those areas that don't naturally link to others? The revisiting of topics needs to be planned in, dare I say it, a much more mathematical way.

My theory on this is based on Ebbinghaus' ‘Forgetting Curve’. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the idea, its hypothesis is that memory retention declines over time when there is no attempt to retain it. Whilst the rate of decline is affected by factors out of our control, there is one factor that we can command: 'The time that has passed since the information was accessed'. The diagram below shows how if we access knowledge at carefully timed intervals, then the rate of decline becomes less and less. The time between each interval can also become greater and greater each time.

In simple terms, following any new teaching, we need to revisit this, a day later, a week later, a month later, two months later, six months later, and so on. Revisiting doesn't simply mean teaching it again. It means giving students an opportunity to access the knowledge that they already have. It doesn't mean teaching it at a faster pace, safe in the knowledge that you have already taught it once so, therefore, students can cope with a faster pace. ‘Planned, Spaced Knowledge Retrieval Practice’ is not about re-teaching; it is about facilitating ways for students to access previously learnt knowledge.

When planning and thinking about knowledge retrieval I have started to follow some basic principles. I'd love to sit here and take these ideas as my own, but those of you who are familiar with the work of a Mr. T Sherrington may well see some similarities between his ideas and those outlined below:

·       Involve all : You need to allow all students to access prior knowledge. Whiteboards are a great way to do this quickly and efficiently. Don't rely on a few students being able to answer your questions as a gauge for everyone knowing it.

·       Vary the style : Whilst quick quizzes are a great way to test student knowledge, there are many other ways to get students to access their schema. Open-ended questions allow students to explore their knowledge in less specific ways. Asking students to create a knowledge map, self or peer explanation are just two other ways that I've tried to create opportunities for students to explore their prior knowledge. And whilst difficult to do in my own area, asking students to 'tell a story' of the key events in the build-up to WWII, or the stages of the digestive system is a great method for students exploring 'what they know'.

·       Repeat, Repeat, Repeat : Asking students to repeat the process, or better still, access the same information in a different way (again in a week or a month) will hopefully allow them to add another layer to their understanding. Looking at the above example, at first, students may only be able to recount the different organs of the digestion system but, by the second time, students will hopefully be able to recall the function of some or all of these.

·       Time-efficient :  I've stopped short of putting a fixed time on how long I spend on these activities, but you still need to maximise the time for learning new material. Marking also needs to be efficient; the last thing any of us need is an increase in our marking load so make these tasks in such a way that students can see quickly what they know well and where they have gaps.

·       Ensure that students are truly accessing their memory : As tempting as it is to use cue-cards, prompts, scaffolds and cheat sheets, students need to be actually exploring what they know. Whilst these support mechanisms have their place in lessons, they also give students a way out, meaning that they are not truly using their memory to retrieve knowledge.

Now, more than ever, we are facing the difficult task of needing to cover a lot of material in a shorter space of time. However, the evidence is clear that unless this material is adequately accessed and reviewed regularly it is, in all likelihood, forgotten.