Bitesize Research: Impact Of Spaced Practice And Retrieval Practice On Learning

 By Jaya Carrier

I hope everyone’s had a great week! This week, I was interested in an article from Edutopia about spaced practice and retrieval practice - two areas that use current understandings of cognitive psychology to support teachers in making learning ‘stick’ more. Objectives: To explain the impact of spaced practice and retrieval practice on student learning and retention. Summary:

• Spaced practice can be thought of as when the learning occurs, and retrieval practice can be thought of as how
• Spaced practice is when students encounter material from the same topic multiple times. It draws on the Ebbinghaus ‘curve of forgetting’.
• Strategies to introduce this into the classroom include planning a quick review of a topic from a few months ago or using homework that draws on material from previous topics.
• Retrieval practice contends that by quizzing the students, teachers do not only perform important AfL but that the act of quizzing actually supports the students to build longer-term knowledge. This is sometimes referred to as the testing effect.
• Retrieving content from one’s memory has been shown to be much more impactful than rereading notes
• Strategies to introduce this into the classroom could be quizzes (using a variety of platforms including Google forms, or quizziz) or having students write down everything they can remember on a mini whiteboard from the last lesson.
• Both strategies can feel very challenging for students, but they offer important opportunities to strengthen learning.

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

• How am I currently using spaced practice and retrieval practice?
• How aware are my students about good study habits that are rooted in cognitive science?
• What other opportunities are there for me to introduce these practices into my teaching?

If you would like to discuss this further with me - please let me know! I’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.

Maximising Your Questioning

By Michael Paulus

As part of Humanities, staff members give short and snappy weekly CPD sessions to the rest of the departments. I wanted to showcase what I felt was a really simple way to structure effective questioning in lessons that aids differentiation, provides retrieval practice to aid memory, supports classroom engagement and increases learners’ self-management through reflection.  In this blog post, I have summarised my CPD on Questioning. Enjoy! 

Scenario: I have just taught costs & profit calculation topic to my year 11 Business students last week. Here is a list of what I covered with them:

As you can see some of the content is more manageable (e.g how to define and give examples of start-up costs), and some content requires a variety of skills, such as calculation of profit based on figures given. Based on this prior learning, I wanted to start my next lesson with a series of questions that serve as retrieval practice and AfL, So I devised this structure to serve as my ‘DO NOW’:

10-Retrieval Questions

1. LPA Q1:  

2. LPA Q2: 

3. MPA Q1: 

4. MPA Q2: 

5. Context-based (linked to a situation, scenario etc)

6. HPA Q1: 

7. HPA Q2: 

8. CHALLENGE (high skill/knowledge question)

9. DEEP (a deep thinking-type question)

10. META/SOC (questioning that requires reflection, metacognition on the content and the wider syllabus)

(NB: I wouldn’t include “LPA Q1” etc on the board!!!!!)

So if I apply the ‘10-Retrieval Questions’ structure to the Costs & Profit topic above, it may look like this in my next lesson!

Other subject areas were also able to apply my 10-Retrieval Questions structure really quickly and successfully for a recent topic they taught:

I’ll end this post with an assortment of ways you might want to try in your lessons to enhance your questioning, which can and should be one of the most interactive and fun aspects of your lesson if you get it right:

• Pre-plan who you might choose before posing the question (but don't say the name first!)
• Rank order (either written or orally) the questions to increase in difficulty
• Give plenty of thinking time before selection (Don’t be afraid of silence!)
• “What is the counterargument for…?” or Can/did anyone see this another way?”
• Relate questions to a situation/scenario/context
• Questioning that asks students to consider deeper connections across topics/subjects
• Consider how you might sequence 2-3 questions that build on each other as they are answered
• Questioning on their self-efficacy towards a topic; “Which key term do you find the most confusing and why?”
• Using your lesson’s (obscure) Key Question to pose as your final question of the lesson
• ‘If this is the Answer... What is the Question?’
• ‘What if...?’, ‘Suppose we knew...?’ and ‘What would change if...?’
• Why do you think this is right….?
• Students devise questioning for peers/other groups
• Question the question: “Why do you think I asked that question?” or “Why was that question important?”

Bitesize Research: Understanding Why Cold Calling Is Effective To Assess Learning

 By Jaya Carrier

I hope everyone had a great half term, and that this first week back is going well. For this week’s bitesize research, I was interested in looking at Tom Sherrington’s take on cold calling in the classroom from February 2021. Objectives: To understand why cold calling is so effective as AfL, and how it might be effectively implemented in a classroom setting. Summary:

The key overall themes are:

• Cold calling supports inclusivity in the classroom wherein everyone’s contributions matter
• Cold calling supports accountability in the classroom - there is no opt-out
• Students are made to think routinely by way of cold calling - it causes a cultural shift
• Cold calling should be the default position for questioning in all classrooms but can be used as part of a wider repertoire of questioning techniques too
• Sherrington notes that cold calling is really powerful in remote learning as well as in-person.
• Sherrington also offers a number of strategies in the article to support with cold calling as effectively as possible

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:

• How much do I use cold calling in my classrooms? Do I use it as the ‘default mode’? What works well in using it?
• How useful are Sherrington’s cold calling strategies in my classroom? What ones can I add or develop in my practice?