Lesson 6 of 6
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Introducing retrieval

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In the era of easy internet searches, many faculty today think we no longer need to have students memorising facts or knowledge or basic skills. Why should they need to do that? they might suspect, since they can always look that information up when they need it. And this comes from a good intention I think on our part, because we ultimately of course, want students to be able to do higher order thinking. We want them to be able to solve problems and answer questions, to be able to do critical and creative thinking.

But what the learning research actually tells us is that we are better able to do critical and creative thinking when we have a strong mastery of foundational knowledge. Our thinking skills actually emerge from a foundation of strong, you know, mastery of facts, knowledge, information. You probably know this from your own experience, right? You’re able to do good critical and creative thinking in your discipline. But you also really do that thinking from a strong foundation of sort of basic knowledge.

So if we want our students to be successful at higher order thinking skills, one of the best things we can do for them is help them gain a mastery of the foundational knowledge in our discipline, the core facts, whatever those might be. Now in this course, we’re going to tackle, how do we help students do that? And what the learning research tells us is very clear. We need to get our students engaging in frequent retrieval practice. And what that means is we are asking students to frequently retrieve knowledge from their memories.

What the research tells us is the more times we retrieve a piece of knowledge from our memory, the better we are able to do that in the future. So the more times we engage in retrieval, the stronger grasp we have on a piece of knowledge. So we’ll think a little bit about what the theory and the research tells us about that. And then we’ll get into some practical strategies for helping you do that in your classrooms.

A fundamental part of helping students learn is improving their ability to retrieve foundational knowledge and skills from their memories. Research from neuroscience and cognitive psychology tells us that if you want your students to be able to retrieve information from memory, you have to help them practice retrieving that information from memory. The more times that students retrieve something from memory, the more easily they are able to access that memory in the future. Learning scientists call this the retrieval effect, or sometimes the testing effect. And yet, we often don’t build this retrieval practice into our teaching, in part because we think other learning activities are more important. Many university faculty believe that they should focus their teaching on helping students think critically or creatively, and that the memorization of knowledge is no longer important in the age of the internet.

But what learning scientists tell us is that our ability to think critically and creatively in a discipline improves dramatically when we have committed the basic knowledge of that discipline to memory. The more knowledge we have, the more sophisticated our thinking becomes. It’s for this reason that one writer refers to foundational knowledge as the “hidden power” of our cognition. So, if you want your students to develop the ability to think critically and solve problems creatively in your courses, it’s essential that you also help them commit the basic knowledge and skills of your discipline to memory. In this course, we’ll consider how you can do that most effectively.

In this course you will learn:

  • The value of retrieval practice and the evidence base for its impact on student learning,
  • How to incorporate retrieval practice into the design and delivery of teaching sessions, both face to face and online,
  • Retrieval practice principles that you can use to apply and adapt the activities presented to your own context.

Some courses and disciplines place a higher priority than others on asking students to memorise basic knowledge and skills. What has been the traditional attitude on this topic in your discipline? Does it value the memorisation of basic knowledge?

Discussions

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