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For me, the key message on retrieval is very simple. You should have your students doing some of it. So, you know, we oftentimes try to think about our classes, you know, in class we’re doing these sort of thinking activities or we’re giving students exposure to new content and we expect them to go out on their own and try to remember things. But I actually think because retrieval practice is so fundamental to learning, we should try to incorporate it into our actual classroom practice, whether we are face-to-face or online.
So the key message for me is, just do it, right. Give students some opportunities to retrieve in class. And again, it can be very short, just a few minutes at the beginning, end of class period, a few minutes, maybe end of break, halfway through a class period, find small ways to incorporate retrieval into your teaching. Now, as we’ve been talking about retrieval, we’ve been thinking about how to help students master knowledge once they have been exposed to it.
In the next course in this sequence, we’re going to focus on what you can do in order to help students prepare to master knowledge. So what are the things that we can do prior to giving students exposure to new course content? And for that, we are going to think about prediction and about how asking students to try something before they are ready is actually one of the best ways to prepare them for learning.
Retrieval practice works well at any time in a teaching session but can be easiest to apply in the opening and closing moments or in the form of regular quizzes, questions, or writing exercises.
- Give frequent, low-stakes quizzes to help build foundational knowledge. Favour short answers or problem solving that requires students to process the information they have retrieved.
- Open teaching sessions by asking students to recap what was covered previously. Give students time to reflect and write down before answering verbally.
- Close teaching sessions by asking students to recap the most important concepts from the day and one question that remains in their minds, which can be a prompt for the next session or further work.
- Close classes by having students take a short quiz or write an answer to a question about the day’s material.
- Use your syllabus to help students consolidate their knowledge and build a useful resource for themselves over time.
Thank you for taking this ‘Small Teaching: Retrieval’ course which has been developed with James M. Lang. We hope you have enjoyed it. Remember to mark this lesson as ‘Mark Complete’ to earn your Course Completion Badge.
Discussions
What obstacles to the increased use of retrieval practice in your classroom do you see? How might you overcome those obstacles?
Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.