Retrieval Practice: Research & Resources for every classroom: Resources and research for every classroom

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As teachers across the UK become more and more evidence-informed, we’re learning to ditch revision games, posters, highlighting, re-reading and mnemonics. It is for this reason that, as part of our curriculum design at Reach Academy Feltham, we have embedded regular multiple-choice tests and quizzes into our curriculum design to help us reap the benefits of retrieval practice.

If your pupils struggle to recall yesterday’s lesson, prompt them to retrieve information from memory by embedding regular quizzes into your curriculum design, with these ideas from Jon Hutchinson, director of training and development at the Reach Foundation… The problem with adding in these silly options is that they distract children from what you actually want them to remember (that “there were no more worlds to conquer”). Over the course of the six weeks, continue to cover the same five to eight concepts, theories or terms in your questions, but pose the questions in different ways.Whether you’re a history specialist or you teach politics, RE, PE or something else entirely, you’ll find this template useful. This retrieval practice grid doesn’t include multiple choice options. This is because, according to Professor John Dunlosky, “students will benefit most from tests that require recall from memory and not from tests that merely ask them to recognise the correct answer”. How to use the grids But what if you did put in that effort, and it worked out? What if you persevered through that short-term pain and feeling of frustration? Imagine you really committed yourself to retrieval practice, and were duly rewarded in a test. No doubt, you would probably feel quite proud of yourself. You would start to feel competent in whatever subject you had decided to really commit to.

Re-reading is, cognitively speaking, easy to do. Reading is easy. When we re-read material we have a voice in our head saying, “Yes, I got that”, no problem. Learners can select the correct answer from memory (higher challenge). Alternatively, you can scaffold the activity by making it multiple choice. In fact a paradigm shift is occurring around revision itself. We’ve moving away from a system where we teach a sequence of lessons, have a revision lesson and then a test. Guilty of delivering lots of new content in lessons but rarely asking students to recall that knowledge? This Kate Jones retrieval practice template will help you break the habit.Design five to eight questions that help students practise retrieving their knowledge on the topic from memory and applying it to answer the question. Within that lesson, there will be some key facts that we don’t want the children to forget. So the very first thing that we do at the start of the next lesson is ask all children to answer the question, “According to myth, who founded Rome?” I think the best way to explain this finding is by thinking about the relative difficulty of the two tasks.

Science teacher Adam Boxer explains that while retrieval practice isn’t the easiest way to revise, it’s definitely the most effective… It doesn’t really matter whether the children get the question right or wrong; they benefit either way from this effective learning technique.They’ll tell you about how funny it was to think about Alexander having a Nando’s. Some children may not get the joke and actually think Alexander the Great did eat Nando’s. These quizzes are no stakes. That is to say, we don’t collect in any scores, and we don’t tell children off or express disappointment if they get a question wrong. That is not the purpose. Instead, we’re replacing these with powerful teaching strategies such as frequent retrieval practice and low-stakes quizzing on core material. This challenges their short-term recall and allows you to challenge their ability to succinctly express knowledge they have retained.