In the short term, your students will hate retrieval practice. They will hate the feeling of not knowing an answer or getting things only partially correct. But the science is clear: it works. Whether you’re a history specialist or you teach politics, RE, PE or something else entirely, you’ll find this template useful. Look at your scheme of learning for a half term. Decide what the key takeaway concepts or vocabulary are in that time. When I first began using test-enhanced learning I made a few mistakes that reduced the effectiveness of retrieval practice. The researchers found that the power of retrieval practice to prepare students for tests held even when they took the tests under extremely stressful conditions.

And psychologists point to competence as an incredibly powerful driver of long term motivation. As we get better at things, we start to enjoy them more.You can probably understand this article very easily, but if you sat a test on it next week would you remember all, or even most, of its details? Probably not. Retrieval Grids include interleaving: Many grids include similar concepts (e.g., names for different historical figures) that require students to discriminate. A few minutes later, I’ll switch to the next slide which has all of the correct answers on, and pupils can self-mark, correcting anything they got wrong. These changes are possible because of how well-researched retrieval practice is. Cognitive scientists have spent decades investigating its use as a memory technique. Though nothing in science is ever beyond question, the positive results across a vast number of studies certainly seem to suggest it’s an effective method. New discoveries Science teacher Adam Boxer explains that while retrieval practice isn’t the easiest way to revise, it’s definitely the most effective…

Design five to eight questions that help students practise retrieving their knowledge on the topic from memory and applying it to answer the question.

How to use the grids

Participants in a study used either re-reading or retrieval practice to learn material, but in varying amounts. After they had a set amount of time with these techniques, they were asked to predict how well they thought they would recall that information in a week or so’s time. I designed the retrieval practice challenge grid to help you purposefully revisit subject knowledge and content previously studied. While this takes place, I’ll whizz around the classroom and make a note of any common misconceptions. The whole episode takes around five minutes.

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…

One of our favourite features of this book is that it is well designed, making it easier to read. Several illustrations summarise the key points – a very clever nod to Dual Coding, discussed in the book as well. Usefulness 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. Instead, we’re moving towards a system where we remove the revision lesson and replace it with frequent opportunities for retrieval practice built in to the main sequence of lessons. Our job is to interrupt this forgetting, by using effective strategies to prompt children to retrieve information from memory. Embed multiple-choice quizzes into your classroom practice

Instead, we’re replacing these with powerful teaching strategies such as frequent retrieval practice and low-stakes quizzing on core material. As teachers across the UK become more and more evidence-informed, we’re learning to ditch revision games, posters, highlighting, re-reading and mnemonics. New information which is not linked to anything else stored in your long-term memory will have a low retrieval strength, as well as a low storage strength. By the end of the week, the retrieval strength of your hotel room number will have increased, by regularly having to recall it. However, the storage strength is likely to remain low; you probably won’t be able to recall it in a year or two. Let’s take an example. In the first lesson of our unit on Roman Britain, the class learn about how Romulus killed his brother to found the city.Teacher and author Kate Jones explains how to use her retrieval practice challenge grid at the start of your lesson... A knowledge organiser is a good learning tool to start from here, as it should include the core information. 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?”