The idea that being tested, testing ourselves and doing other forms of retrieval practice will boost learning has been around for a long time. In his essay on memory, Aristotle talked about it…
‘… exercise in repeatedly recalling a thing strengthens the memory’. And here is the psychologist, Willam James, talking about it in 1890:
A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning (by heart, for example), when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall likely need the book once more’.
However, in only a small proportion of schools has retrieval practice gained a sufficient foothold to be systematically done by everyone – all teachers and all students – across the school – that is our challenge! This blog considers retrieval practice and in particular the significant use of the ‘testing effect’ to boost learning.
Why ‘testing’ has a bad name
The use of high-stakes standardised tests designed to measure young people’s attainment at specific ages has always carried the baggage of high levels of anxiety, last-minute cramming, teaching ‘to the test’ and yet more disadvantage for the already disadvantaged; for many, high-stakes testing leaves a bad taste in the mouth. The Education Reform Act of 1988 introduced new standardised national assessments at ages 7, 11, 14 and 16; this led, over time, to a backlash and subsequent revisions to the national assessment regime, including the dropping of some of the SATs. In this traditional model of testing, which of course goes back much further than the 1980s, the purpose of the national assessments has always been to provide robust evidence of students’ learning, relative to the huge national cohort. Things are changing: whilst we still have the high-stakes standardised national tests, and the criticism of them, we now also have the growing use of testing in schools as a teaching tool to aid the long-term retention of knowledge – used in this way, testing is often described as ‘Retrieval Practice’.
What is retrieval practice?
‘Retrieval Practice’ is any activity that is designed to prompt us to remember something we have already been ‘taught’. The term retrieval practice is therefore broader than testing. Clarity around what we mean by retrieval practice is important; studying something for the first time, for example, would not count as retrieval practice because there is nothing ‘in there’ yet to be retrieved. There are obviously many activities that can be used to prompt retrieval practice: ‘make a mind map, in your own words, covering the 10 key things we have learned in the past three lessons…’; ‘now explain to a friend how to…’; ‘teach your partner the four main causes of…’; ‘fill in the missing words in this text…’ are some examples.
Other popular ways of prompting retrieval practice are in-lesson quizzes, mini-tests and cumulative knowledge exams (usually based on knowledge organisers) set by teachers, and self-quizzing by students based on knowledge organisers.
The point of retrieval practice is the cognitive effort made in trying to remember what we have ‘learned’, which is why re-reading a book or notes, and highlighting or underlining text do not count as retrieval practice – these can be undertaken with very little effort of mind. There is far greater cognitive challenge in: explaining something we have ‘learned’ to someone else; making up a quiz on a topic we have studied with both questions and answers; summarising the main points of a passage of text in our own words; using flash-cards; the already-mentioned forms of quizzes and tests; and the plethora of quiz-style activities available online – done right, these are all good examples of retrieval practice because the cognitive challenge of making an effort to remember is present in the activity.
Why does retrieval practice work?
It works by arresting the natural forgetting to which we are all prone. The work of Ebbinghaus in the 1880s and the subsequent work of others has shown clearly that we ‘forget’ almost everything our senses encounter on a daily basis. Think about whole books you have read; if you can remember much more than the gist, you are exceptional. I cannot now recall anything at all from the year-long courses that I did at university – it feels like whole swathes of my university ‘learning’ are lost to me. I know there must be stuff ‘in there’, of course, but in the absence of retrieval practice over the years, I can’t now recall a single thing from my three university years of ‘learning’. That’s pretty sobering!
In our lives in general, forgetting is a good thing, as our brain filters out most of the things our senses encounter every day, and it is that filtering that allows us to focus on what matters most. But forgetting absolutely isn’t a good thing when it relates to school learning – as teachers, our main aim at school should be to make students smarter by helping them to remember the powerful knowledge that they will need to be successful students and happy, valuable citizens. Learning means remembering this powerful knowledge, not just for tests and exams, but, ideally, forever.
The regular retrieval of knowledge gives us a great chance of remembering, by arresting forgetting, but for best effect it has to be done systematically, and I’m convinced that in most schools, that isn’t happening – yet.
Let’s remind ourselves here what learning is: simply put, it is a change in long-term memory. It is still knowing what quadratic equations are two years after we were taught about them; it’s being able to recite parts of Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy, when we need to; it’s being able to explain the main causes of the Second World War or how the digestive system works or how to confidently answer the French language question, ‘Qu’est-ce que tu as mangé hier soir?’ 6 months after studying them. In other words, it’s being able to retrieve what we have studied long after we first studied it – for that to happen successfully, every teacher needs to be a retrieval practice engineer.
Research on Retrieval Practice
Seminal research on testing was published in 2006 by Henry L Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (‘Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention’), building on earlier work by RL and EA Bjork, HF Spitzer, Henry Gates and others. Roediger and Karpicke were able to demonstrate the usefulness of testing in practical classroom work by showing how it could be used to improve retention of prose passages – since the use of passages of text is a common feature of teaching, the research created huge excitement that reverberates still. In a nutshell, Roediger and Karpicke showed that the traditional balance of studying and testing, represented here:
Study – Study – Study – Study – Test
Was far less effective than this model:
Study – Test – Test – Test – Test
This latter model feels counter-intuitive but the research suggests an 80% increase in retention if students’ studying after the initial presentation of new content consists mainly in doing low-stakes tests – or retrieval practice. In the model, taking tests is a form of studying, of course. This is clearly an astonishing effect size and well worth considering. For retrieval practice to be effective, I think a number of criteria should be met:
1. Testing/retrieval practice should be frequent and largely low-stakes; it is making it a habit that makes the difference
2. Retrieval practice should be supported by the teacher, at least initially, so that students can experience a fair degree of success when they do it – there’s no point in handing students a blank piece of paper and asking them to recall everything they know about conduction, if they end up unable to write anything. There is a delicate balance to be found between creating cognitive challenge and helping students to be able to recall things; the ‘desirable difficulty’ that helps learning stick that testing offers is only desirable if it can be tackled with at least a degree of success
3. Whatever the retrieval practice activity used, it needs to oblige people to make the effort to remember key knowledge they have studied
4. Quizzes and mini tests are great because the questions act as cues, and cues are essential to retrieving things from memory – again, this is why the blank piece of paper is not so good – it offers no cue; this also explains why teachers helping students by giving them the first letter of a sought-after answer is not great, because the first letter is very unlikely to be available six months or a year later as a cue
5. The ‘answers’ need to be available, so that the gaps in learning uncovered by the retrieval practice can be filled
6. And we do it again; and again; and again, over time
The bottom line
The bottom line is that we are all susceptible to illusions that we know more than we do, and the hugely popular study activities of re-reading notes, highlighting or underlining text, and copying notes, only reinforce those illusions. Testing helps us to understand what we know and, crucially, what we don’t, and it provides us with an opportunity to do something about the gaps we uncover in our learning.
Maximising the benefits of retrieval practice: The take-aways:
- Retrieval practice should be used to help students remember what they have learned, ideally forever
- To be effective, retrieval practice needs to be systematic; it needs to be planned for, with frequent routines across the school, that are well understood by students, and used every day
- We need to teach ALL students key retrieval practice activities, such as how to self-quiz, and we need to ensure they practise them; pointing students towards the plethora of techniques they could use to revise is not a good way of ensuring that they will revise effectively – it doesn’t work because most students will not then do the retrieval work effectively; instead they will fall back on that which is comfortable, which is re-reading, highlighting/underlining, and copying text into an exercise book
- Retrieval practice, in the form of low-stakes quizzes and tests, is especially effective because it is hard to hide from questions; they oblige us to think and they enable us to make accurate judgements about what we know and don’t know
- Retrieval practice needs to be embedded throughout the school in the daily practice of both teachers and students, including through the habit of homework
If we can embed retrieval practice throughout the school, through key habits of work every day, we have the wonderful opportunity to boost the learning of all of our students, and make them smarter. As they say in the book ‘Make it Stick’: ‘To learn, retrieve…’
