Boost Information Recall with Regular Quizzes

News Pupils struggling to recall yesterday’s lesson? Prompt them to retrieve information from memory by embedding regular quizzes into your curriculum design, says Jon Hutchinson… Products Cutting edge research from cognitive science is gifting teachers with an understanding of how the brain learns, and how we can adapt instruction, curriculum and assessment to be more effective. Much of this research has only taken place in the last few decades, meaning that it is taking some time to filter into the profession and challenge received wisdom. For example, teachers are commonly told that ‘weighing the pig does not make it any fatter’, which has led to calls in some quarters for less testing, especially in primary school. Though this advice is doubtless well intended, it appears to fly in the face of one of the most robust findings in psychological research: the testing effect. Empirical study into the manner in which memory operates began way back in the 1880s, when Hermann Ebbinghaus measured the rate that information is lost after initially learning it. The conclusions were clear, and have been repeated in multiple contexts and under a huge variety of conditions since: everybody forgets things unless they revisit that information regularly. In the classroom, this means that we should be entirely unsurprised (or cross) by our pupils struggling to recall yesterday’s lesson. Indeed, it is an inevitable and perfectly natural part of the learning process. Our job is to interrupt this forgetting, by prompting the children to retrieve information from memory. It is for this reason that, as part of our curriculum design at Reach Academy Feltham, we have embedded regular quizzes into our curriculum design. Memory measurements Aside from Ebbinghaus, our decisions have been influenced by more recent research into retrieval practice, spearheaded by professorial power couple Robert and […]

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