Retrieval Practice

60%

Retention after around 20 minutes*

40%

Retention after around 1 day*

20%

Retention after around 31 days*

The forgetting curve of Ebbinghaus is from 1885, but it gives us some idea of the retention issues our students face should they have no opportunity to practice at frequent intervals. Our job as teachers is to balance the introduction of new material with the use of retrieval practice to better prepare our students for the mammoth task of recalling information, solving problems and seeing how those skills apply to everyday life in the future.

At my school…

My faculty was taken over by a self-professed maverick two years ago and his seemingly mad suggestions as to working practices are where my journey with retrieval practice starts. We started to produce ‘cumulative starters’ for our year 11 students which included GCSE style questions from previously learned topics. This meant that lessons at the beginning of a term had brief starters with the majority of lesson time being spent on learning new content and as time went on, and new topics were added, less time was spent on new activity up to the point where the ‘starter’ was the entire lesson. The starter sheets varied little lesson-on-lesson to give students a chance to improve their accuracy until the class was achieving a high success rate in a given topic and then this would drop off in favour of something new.

It was a fairly simple hypothesis – repetition until students achieve. And it worked.

The transformation in student attitudes towards their work was palpable. Success bred achievement and the students were clearly able to identify their own strengths and weaknesses within every lesson due to the cumulative nature of the starter. Our results at the end of that academic year were staggering. Education is a complex beast, and the results were due to many other changes which had taken place at that time, however as a classroom practitioner, I was greatly impressed by the potential of that particular intervention. So…I started to read about it.

Research

The first book I read which mentioned ‘retrieval practice’ detailed the steps which we had been following above with out retrieval starters. This was in Mark McCourt’s Teaching for Mastery book, which if you haven’t read, is one to add to your list. He systematically debunks the majority of initial teacher training paraphernalia and sets out current, ongoing research which better aligns with retrieval practices opposed to the hope we’ve pinned on spiral curriculum, homework and revision techniques. As you can see from the fairly damning percentages above, without a systematic approach to practice, much of that knowledge our students once gained in our lessons is lost amongst other things which are being retrieved more generously.

Interestingly, since Tom Sherrington shone a light onto Rosenshine in his Principles in Action book, there have been lots of online discussions about how to build in daily, weekly and monthly review into schemes of work. Rosenshine’s work has been widely accepted by educational establishments as it is firmly rooted in research. Kate Jones’ book, Retrieval Practice: Research & Resources for every classroom, explains the rationale for retrieval as not just being another ‘educational fad’ as there is lots of research that supports it which enables us to better evaluate it’s worth. It is great to see such accessible writing available and I am in awe of the staggering leadership it has taken for the writers of these books to really start influencing the masses (Fangirling at their awesomeness).

What was missing for me, in all of this reading I had been doing, was the science behind retrieval practice. I assumed, as I think most people do, that it was about ‘keeping it at the front of your mind’ whatever that actually means?! I had a limited understanding that it had something to do with making learning go from working, to short term and finally to long term memory, but again I had little understanding of what that meant for a student and of course, my influence in all of it. Thankfully, Kate Jones signalled a few books for those who wanted a more in-depth understanding of the cognitive processes involved in retrieval practice and I found the answers I had been looking for.

The Science of Retrieval

The Learning Scientists, who are a team of academic researchers and cognitive scientists, aim to bridge the gap between research and practice by enabling students, teachers and parents to understand scientific findings in education. Their book Understanding How we Learn: A Visual Guide, gave me the single most important piece of information I needed to understand the crux of retrieval practice.

If you have ever watched Inside Out, you will have witnessed not only a fantastic and emotional rollercoaster of a Disney film, but also a pervading misconception of cognitive processes in the eyes of The Learning Scientists! Many times have I made allegorical use of a library when discussing memory – we must help students ‘file’ their information correctly (Schemas)…rows and rows of orderly books, ready to be retrieved when required. Unfortunately for us, we already had an inkling that this wasn’t the case, and research has helped us to understand that it is much more complicated than that.

“Every time you retrieve a memory, you are actually changing it”

Yana Weinstein and Megan Sumeracki: Understanding How We Learn 2019

For this information to be useful for us as teachers, we need to know why the brain works like this so I’m going to attempt to simplify the cognitive science.

When a student experiences or learns something, neurons, which are nerve cells in the brain, give off an electrical impulse. Nerve cells communicate with each other, by sending impulses through connections which are called synapses.

When an experience is new, synapses (connections) grow between neurons which were previously not linked. This is where ‘small step’ teaching and AfL strategies come into their prime as supporting strategies for retrieval practice.

A memory is merely a group of active neurons which are connected together with synapses. The synchronised pattern created when this group of neurons fire (called an engram) enables a person to recall something or carry out an action.

When something new is experienced, neurons fire and create patterns, but for something to become a memory, the engram must be recognisable as a highly similar pattern. If a pattern is reproductive in the future without the original stimulus, then it can be said to be part of long-term memory.

This doesn’t however mean that the memory is safe from being forgotten, it means there is a higher probability of recall due to the other associated patterns which it has been mapped into.

Consolidation occurs following the building of these new connections, and the process starts over again upon a new stimulus. Most notably, the fact that the pattern is ‘highly similar’ alludes to the fact that upon retrieval, the connections are never exactly the same and as such each time information is retrieved, the synapses undergo re-consolidation. This is why retrieval makes changes to memories opposed to purely accessing them.

If you think of it as a car journey, there are many routes you could take from your house to where you work, but you are most likely to take the shortest route. What retrieval practice appears to do, is enable students to find the most efficient route of connections through actively making as many other connections as possible through trial and error. But, as teachers, we are best placed to remove some of the error in this process to enable connections conducive to long term learning to be made.

What does this mean for us as teachers?

Quite simply it means, we’ve got a very complicated job! It boils down to four key aspects:

1. Experiences and memories which can be recalled well by students are the best foundation to build new knowledge upon.
2. Small step teaching and AfL enable us as teachers to bridge previous experiences to new experiences to better equip students to form associations.
3. Highly similar patterns of neuron firing enable students to create engrams which are associated with long-term memory – practice in the early stages of learning should be highly similar to how it was first encountered to enable these patterns to be fully explored.
4. Re-consolidation is interesting for us as teachers. If our students have been through this process and the new knowledge is embedded in their long-term memory, then what is the role of retrieval practice? Teacher judgement of when a student has gained inflexible or procedural knowledge of a concept is important because this is where task design is pivotal. To enable students to recognise the concept in the myriad of ways it may be presented to them, we must expose them to the variation attached to the given concept. They must know the extreme examples of it, and they must recognise it within unnecessary information if they are to succeed as problem solvers with the given knowledge. This is where retrieval practice could unlock the potential within our students to make connections they may not have conceived as possible.

To finish…

I have no doubt that most of this would not have been much of a surprise to readers, but I’m hoping that the rationale and perhaps some of the scientific reasoning may have shed some light on practices. I know I learned a considerable amount in a short space of time from the wonderful influencers I have mentioned throughout this blog. I want to thank them greatly for imparting their knowledge and I hope I’ve done their thinking justice. I will be following up with another blog about variation theory, which I alluded to in this blog. It’s somewhat of a passion of mine, so I’m keen to share what I know.

Hopefully this summary will inspire you to find out more about the topic, or you have some interpretations to share below. Feel free to comment or share.

Sources

Jones, K. (2019) Retrieval Practice: Research & resources for every classroom. Suffolk: John Catt

McCourt, M. (2019) Teaching for Mastery. Suffolk: John Catt

Sherrington, T. (2019) Rosenshine’s Principles in Action. Suffolk: John Catt

Sumeracki, M. & Weinstein, Y. (2019) Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide. Abington: Routledge

*The actual percentages vary in a variety of subsequent studies of ‘forgetting’ and so these are suggested as reasonable estimates. A fairly recent replication study found that although there is generally a downward trend in retention there was actually a temporary increase or ‘boost’ in retention of content after the learners first sleep, which reinforces the importance of next day retrieval or daily review.